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Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara: The Beauty of the CRM Beast

By Vivian WagnerSep 6, 2018

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO ofNimble, a social sales and marketing CRM company based in Santa Monica, California.

Nimble helps companies identify the right people for their businesses, with the goal of turning conversations into measurable outcomes. Its vision is to make the job of all customer-facing team members easier and more effective.

In this exclusive interview, Ferrara offers his insights on the latest developments and trends in CRM.

CRM Buyer: Why is social context important in CRM?

Jon Ferrara:The reality of relationships is that people buy from people they like, know and trust. In the old days, before we ever engaged in selling, we made a connection by looking at books, things on the shelves, that kind of thing. Today, we're doing that more and more electronically.

Social is the perfect way to know more about somebody, and that's actually your job. You should do that before every call -- you should prep by getting to know someone. Social context helps you do that.

CRM Buyer: What's the most useful kind of social context?

Ferrara:People connect through family, friends, food, fun and fellowship. If you find a place of connectivity, you can share that with the person.

For instance, I had a meeting with someone, and before that meeting, I learned that he was an assistant scoutmaster in the Boy Scouts. Anyone who has done that knows it's an important experience. Knowing that about him gave us instant camaraderie.

In many cases in business people put up walls, and you have to earn their trust. LinkedIn is like walking into my lobby. You'll learn about my business persona and know more about another human being. But people buy from people, not from businesses. This is what Dale Carnegie taught, and today we're just doing it in a new way, in the digital era.

Another example is today, before you meet with someone, you typically google them. That's you working for your CRM, and it's a waste of time.

Most people work for their CRM -- it doesn't work for them. That's the biggest cause of failure for CRM. Even when you do google someone, things change, and that information might be old. Your CRM should work for you and work with you wherever you're working.

CRM Buyer: Why is mobile connectivity important for CRM?

Ferrara:It's not just the mobile phone. Most CRM is not really designed for relationships, but for reporting. If they aren't forced to use CRM, most people wouldn't.

When I think of mobile, I think of portability. You enrich it with email data, and have a plug-in on your browser so you can use it wherever you are. That gives you contacts and insights. Who are they and what is their business? If you have contacts and insights, you'll be more connected.

The ability to have that mobile context wherever you are gives you the insights you need to make connections. Your CRM should work for you. That is the future of CRM. You don't have to go to it to use it. Instead, it will go anywhere you are, where you are connecting and engaging.

CRM Buyer: What role does artificial intelligence play in CRM? How is that role evolving?

Ferrara:You need to enrich the data and then use AI to surface opportunities and engagement. Most people have thousands of connections, and you need AI to listen to signals and surface the ones that matter, and then you need a nudge on your shoulder to follow through and connect and reconnect with people.

AI is like a second brain that helps you follow through and stay in touch with the right people at the right time and the right place.

CRM Buyer: What's the key to effectively enriching data?

Ferrara:You need to be able to take any disparate piece of information and derive additional information. Most sales people are googling people and then logging that information into their CRM. Even if they do that, however, the data changes so rapidly that it decays.

We use dozens of external databases on a business and personal level to enable connections and engagement. The age of cold calling has transitioned from "bag 'em and tag 'em" to establishing yourself as a trusted advisor, and to do that you need to use content to inspire and educate.

CRM Buyer: Why are automatic updates important in managing a CRM system?

Ferrara:People change, and companies change. One of the biggest struggles that salespeople have is creating records and updating records.

If you can take away the mundane things that computers should be doing, it will free the sales reps up for things that only they can do, like logging a note or scheduling a task or connecting on social in a relevant and authentic way. That's what computers are for. They were designed to automate all of this.

CRM Buyer: How is CRM changing? What's in the future for it?

Ferrara:One of the biggest causes of CRM failure is that businesses just give it to their salespeople. It is not just for salespeople. It should be used by everybody in the company.

The first step to success is to have a unified relationship platform that's cross-departmental. Today you have sales, marketing, customer service, accounting -- and Nimble can co-exist with those by unifying contacts and working back inside them, as well. It can be used across departments, so you can see the history of interactions.

CRM is going to evolve to be a company-wide relationship record, and in the future it will be used by all the different team members. It will evolve to become a platform that works with you in any place you are engaging. That will cause it to be used more often.

A lot of people see CRM as a beast and a burden that they have to nurture and feed, but imagine if it actually helped that business' people and the people they're connecting to.

CRM will evolve to be used by outside constituencies as well. Most companies have CRM for salespeople, but other departments use spreadsheets. That's really problematic. CRM will evolve from being a platform used just by salespeople to become a platform used by the entire team.

The result is 12 road-tested best practices and common fails to consider when launching your next influencer marketing campaign.

While top influencers may be beyond the budget of all but large companies, micro influencers with a local presence also deliver a big bang for your marketing buck. This gives small businesses the opportunity to use influencer marketing as part of their overall campaigns too.

The key is to use influencer marketing effectively and not squander the opportunity with the wrong strategy.

“Sadly, despite its potential, many Influencer Marketing campaigns fall flat,”explainsPublic and Influencer Relations Specialist and Nimble’s Director of Communications Jenna Dobkin, on the Nimble Blog. “Browse any social media channel – most especially Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or Twitter – and you’re sure to encounter at least one transparent influencer endorsement that a well-intended brand paid an exorbitant amount of money for.”

Tips for Influencer Marketing Campaigns

Specifically on the infogrphic, Heather Dopson, Community Builder for GoDaddy urges marketers to ‘Put people first’. With this practice in place, you can build long-term relationships mutually beneficial for all parties involved. This includes your audience, your brand and the influencer in question.

When looking at influencer marketing “It is not a transactional exchange, but rather friends helping friends to succeed together,” Alton adds.

Experts also insist the more you collaborate with your influencer and build a relationship, the more your audience will relate to what you are trying to say.

So Bryan Kramer, CEO at PureMatter cautions brands to ‘Keep it Real’ to make the relationship with influencer marketers natural and fun instead of forced and static.

Today’s consumers are savvy. If they feel the influence is being forced, Kramer warns, you will lose the benefit of word-of-mouth marketing credibility.

To this end, Shane Barker, CEO of Shane Barker Consulting cautions against the temptation to ‘Micromanage influencers’. Remember, influencers have built their audiences through their own creativity. So imposing your own approach on them can be a mistake.

Barker explains, “Micromanaging influencers and constantly interfering with their work only spells disaster.” He adds, “Respect the creative process and allow them to create content the way they know best.”

You can look at the infographic here to see what the experts have to say about these dos and don’ts. If you want more insights, you can download The Ultimate Influencer Marketing Playbook of 2018 eBook from Nimblehere.

Nimble Today Page Puts All Your Small Business Info in One Place

Most small business owners rely on tech tools to help become more organized, efficient, productive and successful. But often tools touted as “saviors” for small businesses are merely smaller, less useful versions of enterprise-level solutions.

Nimble Today Page

That’s what makesNimble, a social sales and marketing CRM expressly designed for small businesses, so useful. Last month, the company introduced a “Today Page,” a customizable dashboard that consolidates the data small business owners need all in one place. At a glance, you can see your deals pipeline, sales funnel, appointments, to-do lists, tasks and what Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara calls “social signals.” Reading social signals is another way to say you’re engaging in social listening, which allows you to see — and react to what people are saying about you on Twitter. You can also schedule social posts to appear on your Twitter and Facebook business page.

Ferrara, a serial entrepreneur who’d previously (in 1989) co-founded one of the first CRM programs — Goldmine Software — calls the Today Page “a dashboard for relationships.” This is the latest of what Ferrara says is a “rapid stream of powerful innovations” to help business owners “close more deals at scale.” For example, another feature,Nimble Mobile 3.0, “unifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into a comprehensive relationship manager.”

If you’re an Office 365 or G Suite user, Nimble 3.0 shows youpast conversationsyou’ve had with clients or prospects and provides social context, as well. It also allows you “to follow up and follow through” using Nimble’s templated emails, email tracking and visual pipeline manager.

Ferrara is a big believer in the power of social media. When you add social to more traditional CRM features, you turn CRM into a powerful discovery tool. Ferrara says you can learn important details about prospects and clients — and deepen your relationships with them by seeing their Twitter profiles and turning what you learn there into “engagement opportunities.” Let’s say, for instance you had a meeting scheduled with a potential client. You can find out more about them by clicking on their Twitter profiles and learning about their interests or activities. Maybe they root for the same sports team you do. Or perhaps you’re both alumni of the same college or grew up in the same state. Maybe you share a deep love of sushi. Knowing details like these can help you personalize early conversations, which makes it easier to create relationships. Nimble even enables you to discover prospects’ email addresses.

Nimble CRM Designed for Small Businesses

Ferrara says he’s long been motivated “to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize ambitious goals by enabling them to treat every prospect and customer like valued individuals.”

And of course, you still get the features of a robust CRM system. You can manage deals in your pipeline, see who on your team is involved with specific clients/prospects, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes and monitor leads and opportunities in your sales funnel.

Nimble also uses “AI-driven contact data” which can suggest people and companies you may want to connect with based on various criteria, such as job titles and areas of interest.

The program saves you and your team a lot of time because it “automagically” (one of Ferrara’s favorite words) adds insights about companies, including industry, size, location, employee head count and revenue, to help you target the best prospects. And it keeps your contact information current.

Ferrara says Nimble is the future of CRM. Having contacts isn’t enough anymore, he adds. But, when you add context to contacts you can make connections that lead to lasting relationships.

Like most entrepreneurs Ferrara is dreaming big — his goal is to reach 50 million customers. He believes he can get there by marrying CRM with business intelligence, social listening and mobile/browser apps.

Nimble Evolves to The Simple CRM for Office & Dynamics 365

Bio:Jon Ferrara is a serial CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com, has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. Jon is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

Here's Why Nimble Is So Successful

Thomas Wieberneit, July 10, 2018

The News

In the past few weeks there have been two interesting announcements by Nimble. First, on June 14, 2018 Nimble announced apartnership with Velosio, one of the largest Microsoft Dynamics VARs in North America. Velosio and Nimble entered into a global reseller agreement. As a part of this agreement Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365. Velosio is the latest prominent name in among the growing number of Microsoft/Nimble partners.

One week later, on June 20, 2018 Nimble announced a revamp of its application homepage with theNimble Todaypage. This dashboard page gives the user a clear and customizable view of their sales pipeline, calendar appointments, tasks and social signals with relationship insights directly embedded in the widgets. As a start the page offers 6 widgets

Deals

Events

Tasks

Highlighted Contacts

Signals

Stage Funnel

that can get freely rearranged. The Today Page is also available for iOS users now and will be available to Android users soon.

The Bigger Picture

The enterprise CRM market is saturated. There are at least 4 tier one players for every major CRM function that are competing for supremacy. Customer demands have evolved from requiring transactional applications to getting high value solutions that allow the delivery of high-end customer (and user) experience.

The market itself has morphed from a suite market to a best-of-breed application market, and now to a platform and ecosystem market. In this market it is important to excel in two, maybe three areas:

Platform as a Service (PaaS). The platform itself must support current and future technologies that enable the fast and easy creation of value through applications that are developed within its ecosystem

A broad ecosystem. This creates the reach and relevance that is necessary to become and remain a relevant player in the enterprise software market.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). While IaaS in itself is a commodity, it can become an asset when it is combined with a strong application platform (PaaS) and ecosystem. The right combination affords the tremendous opportunity to provide (anonymized) data for machine learning models that can then provide value to all customers

This is exactly the chance for young and hungry SMB players with enterprise ambitions likeZohoorFreshworksto become significant players, to name just two.

The risk for enterprise software makers is to be disrupted from below – similar to what Salesforce did to the Oracle’s and SAP’s of the world when CRM was still more of a suite game turning into a cloud-based best-of-breed application market.

The big players have understood this.

All of them.

And they are pursuing different strategies to achieve, maintain, or protect their respective leadership positions.

My PoV and Analysis

Microsoft is one of these contenders. With the help of Nimble, Microsoft has one of the stronger strategies in the field.

Here is why, coming from the Nimble perspective. I will write about Microsoft’s side when I refresh myClash of Titansarticle. It’s been almost two years since I wrote it and all vendors have moved enough to warrant this update.

So stay tuned.

But I digress; so let’s get back to our topic.

Nimble’s latest partnership with Microsoft channel partners, as well as the revamp of what I would call their app home page, cater to the needs of, but not only, small businesses. They also show that Nimble is quickly maturing as a valuable part of the Microsoft ecosystem. Partnerships like the one with Velosio are a tremendous growth opportunity for Microsoft, Velosio, and Nimble, because they provide high value to their joint customers. This can potentially have a very good impact on Nimble’s growth figures and give Microsoft quite an edge in the contest for winning the race for the fast growing SMB CRM business.

Following my definition of a CRM system as an enabler of the marketing, sales, and service pillars, I still wouldn’t name Nimble a CRM system; but then contact management, account management and SFA are some of the core challenges facing every business, especially the smaller ones.

So, with the Nimble partnership Microsoft has a solid and credible foot in the SMB CRM market.

That foothold is solid and credible for two reasons.

First, because both Nimble and Microsoft have strong, smart ecosystems plays and because Nimble’s functionality is maturing at a rapid pace.

Nimble is an important entry point for fast-growing companies into the Microsoft ecosystem. Because Nimble can enrich Dynamics profiles and deliver them in the browser, in Office 365 and on social media, these companies can grow via Nimble into the Dynamics suite of software.

Second, because Nimble is hungry.

The company is essentially following the successful strategy of Goldmine,Jon Ferrara’searlier CRM play. This includes partnering with Microsoft and partnering with a range of high profile resellers while providing helpful functionality.

This is evidenced by both recent announcements: the strong ecosystem play that Nimble is pursuing by partnering with Microsoft, and its announcement regarding the new Today Page. Providing this dashboard seems to signify a move away from the focus on Social Media that was seen until now. This dashboard page makes the application a bit more mainstream but at the same time gives users what they need and want – support for outreach beyond social media.

Now, after all this raving, I have some suggestions for Nimble on how to become even better.

Although Nimble relies a lot on Azure there could be more usage of Azure’s machine learning/AI capabilities. This holds true especially for lead scoring and opportunity scoring. Providing enabling functionality like this becomes increasingly important with the complexity of deals handled. The goal is to provide even more value to sales representatives and their managers by indicating which customers and opportunities to focus on. Companies likeClariare showing the way here. Salesforce and SAP have solutions for this, too. Azure offers the technology – and Nimble already collects the data for providing pre-learned models that can be optimized for its customers.

Four Tips for Office 365 Resellers To Be More Nimble in 2018

ByMike Wardell,June 22, 2018

Migrating your organisation's workload to the cloud doesn't have to be a hassle.

Unequivocally, the best way to ensure successful adoption of the modern workplace is to drive home its intrinsic value to your customer. It all depends on where they are in their cloud roadmap. Your customer may not feel comfortable or ready to migrate all their business data into the cloud at once. Based on our experience as one of the UK's top Cloud Distributors, we repeatedly hear from our customers that, when speaking to SMEs, one of the most popular options they choose is a hybrid model. Based on that experience, if planned and executed appropriately, resolving entrenched business issues is an essential part of a successful cloud migration and workplace transformation.

Here are four steps to improve your chances of success:

1. Identify the target platform best suited for the organisation

Numerous factors weigh into the decision to select either Office 365, G Suite or another productivity suite entirely. Among them are the desire to continue using productivity applications on the desktop, ensuring files are stored securely in the cloud, and that access to email is easy, flexible and able to be scaled.

Office 365's dominance in the cloud productivity space - now more than 120 million business users worldwide - is driven largely due to the ubiquity of Microsoft Office applications and people's familiarity of using Excel, Word and PowerPoint in business. Despite modern file transferring tools such as Dropbox, WeTransfer, OneDrive and Acronis Files Cloud's disruption in the market, many people continue to prefer to send each other files over email, created locally with Microsoft apps, as that's what feels familiar and safe. Choosing Office 365 allows teams to hit the ground running by working collaboratively online with easy editing options. Plus, it also offers more advanced virus protection and rights management functionalities.

Small businesses that elect G Suite favour its born-in-the-cloud, basic personal and team productivity tools. It's particularly favoured by small start-ups who have no need to transition their business into the cloud, since they've been part of a cloud network from day one. If their business grows at an extraordinary pace, however, they may feel the need to transition to the Office 365 productivity suite, which promotes generous file storage and email storage packages compared to the G Suite entry level plan.

2. Chart your migration path carefully

It's widely understood that when migrating to the cloud, the more intricate the cloud architecture is, the less likely the migration will be successful. To minimise complexity and the risk of compromising data during a migration, consider what your customer wants, how much time and resources you'll need to dedicate to the project, and where and when you'll implement the migration to mitigate customer impact.

Let's circle back to the customer's roadmap. Migrating to Office 365 can be relatively painless, depending on what email solution they've used previously. There are a number of options you could take, including but not limited to:

Cutover Migration

Great for organisations with fewer than 2,000 mailboxes

Used with on-premises Exchange Servers to Office 365

Maintains the mailboxes during migration without any additional steps

No more than 150 mailboxes should be migrated at a time

IMAP Migration

Used when migrating from a non-Exchange system such as Webmail or G Suite

Manually create the Exchange mailboxes in Office 365 by using a CSV file containing; email address, username and password for each individual user

You can only migrate items in a user's inbox - no calendars, contacts or tasks

You can only migrate 500,000 items max from a user's mailbox (newest to oldest)

Use a third-party email migration tool

Many of our customers utilise the Office 365 Marketplace to find migration tools that will suit their customer

Popular choices include; CloudMigrator and SkyKick

It's important to note that when choosing your customer's migration path, agility and nominal cost-efficiency aren't enough. The best way forward is to select a cloud resource that is intimately familiar with a particular configuration and offers applicable migration support services.

3. Develop a single system of record for teams to share contacts and conversations

For Microsoft customers that have legacy CRMs, we generally recommend migrating to Microsoft Dynamics 365. It combines CRM and ERP into one solution and is a step in the right direction for companies that want to use ERP in a limited capacity or as an integrated business management solution that includes Office 365, Outlook, and Power BI for reporting.

However, Dynamics 365 is not a self-starter CRM kit for businesses. In cases where Dynamics feels too complex or expensive, especially to businesses that conduct their contact relationships via email and retain customer information on spreadsheets, we recommend Nimble CRM. It's a social CRM that runs inside Office 365, Outlook or G-Suite email, contacts and calendars, social media platforms and mobile applications. Nimble unifies contact data and engagement history from disparate systems into a single system of record with socially enriched profiles that are easily accessible across team members, channels and platforms.

4. Facilitate end user adoption

Ultimately, the success of a cloud migration isn't in the promised technical functionality, it's how the organisation reacts and adapts to it. ITCs that address end user pain points, in addition to providing help desk support with a fully managed service, stand the best chance of enabling a successful workplace transformation.

Nimble's 80% end user adoption rate attests to the intrinsic value business teams see in fixing deep-rooted contact management issues. Without problem-solving solutions like Nimble, businesses could be stunting their growth. On average, sales people spend a fifth (19%) of their day researching data and insights, according to Cirrus Insight. That percentage translates into an astounding 49 days per year, or £4,029 per salesperson, per year (based on the average salary). This time is better spent in other ways; customer engagement, cross-selling, upselling and so on.

At the very core, using cloud solutions is all about making things easier for the end user. When they can reach everything in one place, with one set of login credentials and integrate their productivity suite with other applications like Nimble, it gives businesses the room they need to expand, grow and scale at large.

Nimble CRM Unveils Today Page To Enable Next Best Actions Based On Sales And Marketing Triggers

Customer Visualization Tool Helps Small Businesses Make Better Decisions, Work More Effectively Using Contextual Relationship Insights

Nimble today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels; appointments and to-dos; and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page in Nimble CRM- Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can —

Manage Deals in the Pipeline.

Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.

Nimble CRM Pipeline

Track the Sales Funnel.

Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.

Funnel

Follow-Up on Tasks.

Click to follow through on to-do’s to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings.

Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.

Scan Business Signals.

Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter conversations, birthdays, and more. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.

Nimble CRM Signals

Network with Highlighted Contacts.

Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on preferences such as job title, company, or areas of interest.

Nimble CRM Enables to Treat Every Prospect and Customer like Valued Individuals

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize ambitious goals by enabling them to treat every prospect and customer like valued individuals,” said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneerJon Ferrara.

Jon added, “Our core values have guided a rapid stream of powerful innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data to help them understand and take steps to close more deals at scale.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,” saidShane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant.

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business — but with Nimble I actually am!” saidMarcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst.

Marcy added, “Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

Customer Visualization Tool Helps Small Businesses Make Better Decisions, Work More Effectively Using Contextual Relationship Insights

Nimble, the pioneering social sales and marketing CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels, appointments and to-dos, and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page – Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can:

Manage Deals in the Pipeline:Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.

Track the Sales Funnel:Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.

Follow-Up on Tasks:Click to follow through on to-dos to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings:Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights, including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.

Scan Business Signals:Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter and Facebook engagements and birthdays, amoung others. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.

Network with Highlighted Contacts:Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on user preferences such as job titles, industries, or locations.

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize their ambitious goals,”said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara.“Our core values have guided a rapid stream of innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data, which empower teams to treat all contacts like valued individuals.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,”saidShane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant. “Single-click access to contacts’ enriched profiles helps me communicate personally and more effectively with all my customers and prospective buyers.”

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business – but with Nimble I actually am!”said Marcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst.“Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business, including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

Nimble CRM Launches Today Page for Office 365 and G Suite

SUDIPTO GHOSH, June 20, 2018

Customer Visualization Tool Helps Small Businesses Make Better Decisions, Work More Effectively Using Contextual Relationship Insights

Nimble, a leading social sales and marketing CRM for Office 365 and G Suite, today launched the Today Page. The customer data visualization tool helps teams and professionals understand and take next best actions based on sales and marketing triggers, as well as project management milestones. The customizable dashboard consolidates critical business signals, including deals pipelines and sales funnels; appointments and to-dos; and social signals into one encapsulated, actionable panel available to all Nimble users, out-of-the-box and at no extra charge.

The Today Page in Nimble CRM- Better Business Decisions, More Effective Communications

In minutes, small business teams (especially those managing contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets) can begin making better business decisions and nurture key relationships far more effectively. Specifically, users can —

Manage Deals in the Pipeline.

Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved in all of your deals, update deal status, assign tasks, add notes, or create new deals.

Nimble CRM Pipeline

Track the Sales Funnel.

Monitor prospects, leads, and opportunities in each stage. Effortlessly gauge whether there are enough deals in the pipeline to meet your goals. Zoom into any deal to view actionable insights and take next steps.

Funnel

Follow-Up on Tasks.

Click to follow through on to-do’s to cultivate the right deals and connections, both one-on-one and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings.

Glance through appointments and find out more about the people you’re meeting. Click on their profiles to discover social insights including interests, social media accounts, history of conversations, notes, and more.

Scan Business Signals.

Discover engagement opportunities with customers and prospects such as Twitter conversations, birthdays, and more. Easily access detailed dossiers on people in the network; learn who they are, how to reach them, their interests, history of conversations with team members, account notes, and more.

Nimble CRM Signals

Network with Highlighted Contacts.

Nimble’s dashboard engine utilizes AI-driven contact data to recommend people to connect with based on preferences such as job title, company, or areas of interest.

Nimble CRM Enables to Treat Every Prospect and Customer like Valued Individuals

“For years, Nimble has been on a mission to develop a simple contact relationship manager that helps small business teams and individual professionals realize ambitious goals by enabling them to treat every prospect and customer like valued individuals,” said Nimble CEO and CRM pioneerJon Ferrara.

Jon added, “Our core values have guided a rapid stream of powerful innovations, including the visualization of business intelligence and customer data to help them understand and take steps to close more deals at scale.”

“With Nimble’s Today Page, I have a clear understanding of the lead generation and sales tasks I need to prioritize in order to close more deals,” saidShane Barker, Digital Strategist, Brand & Influencer Consultant.

“I used to think I was always on top of EVERYTHING for my business — but with Nimble I actually am!” saidMarcy Massura, President of MM+CO and Convince & Convert analyst.

Marcy added, “Nimble’s new customizable dashboard unifies all the important information about my business including my calendar appointments, follow-ups, social signals, and pipeline signals. Immediately after logging in, I know the most critical actions I need to take.”

CRM Nimble Signs Reseller Agreement with Microsoft Master VAR Velosio

Nimbleand Microsoft North American partnerVelosiohave announced a global reseller agreement.

Backed by expert assessment, training, community forums and support professionals, Velosio will resell Nimble CRM as one of the earliest participants in Microsoft’sPartner Center Third Party Software Offerspilot, a partner-to-partner marketplace designed to solve specific customer needs.

Beginning in June, Velosio’s 200 channel partners can purchase, manage, and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365 to small business teams adopting their first CRM. It can be provisioned from within the online Cloud Marketplace, where the entire Microsoft Dynamics portfolio, Office 365 family, and Azure services are supported.

“While Dynamics 365 is ideally suited for Microsoft customers looking for an enterprise-class business management solution, it’s by no means a self-starter CRM kit,” explained Tyler Bowman, Director of Cloud Sales and Operations for Velosio. “In cases where small business teams manage contact relationships via email and retain customer information on spreadsheets, we recommend Nimble CRM as a step in the right direction. Nimble’s 80 percent end user adoption rate attests to the tremendous value this customer segment realizes when fixing deep-rooted contact management issues.”

Nimble integrates with Microsoft Dynamics 365 to address customer growth as their needs become more complex in order to maximize customers’ investments in cloud services.

“Starting with a simple CRM facilitates an eventual upgrade to Dynamics CRM as their enterprise CRM,” Bowman added.

Nimble enables Office 365 customers to manage relationships more effectively within a single, socially enriched system of record. The contact relationship manager builds a team database from insights available in and around the business. Nimble enriches email, appointments, social media, and SaaS-based connections with social insights and business context. It also delivers contact and business profiles within Office 365, across the Web, in popular SaaS applications, and on mobile devices.

“We are excited to partner with Velosio and its channel partners to deliver immediate value as a modern CRM for small business teams,” said Kevin Turner, Head of Strategic Partner Development at Nimble. “Once Office 365 users have a grasp of Nimble’s ‘what’s in it for me’ factor, they’re far more likely to embrace the modern workplace.”

Nimble Signs Reseller Agreement with Velosio

Nimble, a provider of CRM for Microsoft Office 365, and Microsoft partner Velosio today announced a global reseller agreement. Velosio will resell Nimble CRM as one of the earliest participants in Microsoft's Partner Center Third Party Software Offers pilot, a partner-to-partner marketplace.

Velosio's 200 channel partners can purchase, manage, and resell Nimble CRM bundled with Microsoft Office 365 to small business teams adopting their first CRM. It can be provisioned from within the online Cloud Marketplace, where the entire Microsoft Dynamics portfolio, Office 365 family, and Azure services are supported.

"While Dynamics 365 is ideally suited for Microsoft customers looking for an enterprise-class business management solution, it's by no means a self-starter CRM kit," said Tyler Bowman, director of cloud sales and operations at Velosio, in a statement. "In cases where small business teams manage contact relationships via email and retain customer information on spreadsheets, we recommend Nimble CRM as a step in the right direction. Nimble's 80 percent end user adoption rate attests to the tremendous value this customer segment realizes when fixing deep-rooted contact management issues."

"We are excited to partner with Velosio and its channel partners to deliver immediate value as a modern CRM for small business teams," said Kevin Turner, head of strategic partner development at Nimble, in a statement. "Once Office 365 users have a grasp of Nimble's what's-in-it-for-me factor, they're far more likely to embrace the modern workplace."

How to Get Staff to Actually Use Your CRM System

By Jenna Dobkin

Simple ways to ensure that your team adopts your CRM solution and makes it part of their day-to-day.

People are naturally resistant to change. While that’s not always a bad thing, I’ve encountered my fair share of people resistant to the changes and massive opportunities that social CRM creates for business teams.

Since Gartner’s 2001 study found a 50% CRM failure rate, study after study has reported failure rates between 30% and 70%. A primary cause of failure is lack of use: people would rather spend their time working around their CRM, continuing to manage their contact relationships via email and retaining customer information on spreadsheets, rather than change their work habits.

They are even less inclined to adopt a CRM that adds time-consuming tasks to their workload. According toSales Hacker, the average employee spends four hours per week entering data into their CRM, equating to an astounding 25 days per year.

A CRM which requires its end users to manually update conversation histories and contact information is faulty at its core. Instead, it should free up your time to be more effective at customer engagement, cross-selling, upselling, and so on.

Here are a few simple ways to ensure you have a successful CRM implementation right from the get-go:

Pay attention to user needs and benefits

Clearly demonstrate how using the right CRM can vastly improve user productivity.Nimble CRM’s 80% end user adoption rate attests to the intrinsic value business teams see in fixing deep-rooted contact management issues. Once your team has a grasp on the “what’s in it for me” factor, they’re more likely to stick with your newly implemented contact relationship management tool.

If you’ve already picked a CRM that lacks business solutions designed to make end users more effective, look into sales enablement add-ins that deliver intrinsic value to the end user such as:

Sales intelligence tools likeDiscoverOrgorInsideViewfor people and company information, which saves users time they’d otherwise spend Googling prospects and entering the data they find in the CRM.

Email tracking tools likeYesware, which provides the ability to see engagement signals such as opens and clicks to helps end users identify optimal engagement points and improve communications with prospective customers.

Sync contacts and payment status from invoicing and payment systems such as Quickbooks orDue.comto ensure contact data is current in the billing system, and payment status is communicated among sales and business development team members.

Clearly define company-specific CRM usage protocols

Don’t enter into a new CRM with the mindset that increased sales, productivity, and effectiveness will just happen naturally. That’s like giving someone a desk from Ikea to assemble without providing the instructions manual. Define specifically what features are to be used, when, how, and why to optimize users’ time and efforts.

Decrease your team’s time spent on busy work

On average, a salesperson spends nearlytwo-thirds (64.5%)of their time on non-revenue generating activities such as administration and data entry. With the right technologies (such as Nimble’s newProspectortool for sourcing verified contact data, social profile matching and newly optimizedToday Pageto help you prioritize outreach) and the right processes, you can easily cut time spent on busy work in half.

Start from the bottom, up

It’s unrealistic to assume people will learn to effectively use every facet of your social CRM at once. Start by setting the basics in place before layering more advanced processes on top. Focus first on the simpler features, followed by those that require a higher level of comfort with the CRM application and new processes. Ongoing change is best achieved when done over time, with plenty of positive reinforcement along the way.

Top 10 Tips for Finding The Best Investment for Your Company

byJennifer Tomlinson

Investment is the lifeblood of a startup, and it’s imperative to know how to get the right investments, at the right time, in the right way.

Typically, the first investment a company receives is 20 to 30 percent of its value, but investments can take many forms. The two most common are seed money (debt a company takes on at evaluation of specific price points), or a venture capital commitment (debt converts to shares given parameters). Regardless of the chosen approach, companies must manage expectations and relationships for success.

With insights from Jon Ferrara, CEO of Microsoft partnerNimble, we’ve created 10 tips to help you navigate the turbulent waters of investments. In 2017, Jonraised USD9 million in Series A investment fundsto scale Nimble, the simple CRM for Office 365. He also foundedGoldMineCRM, Microsoft’s top ISV partner in the 90s.

There’s plenty of money out there, but pick carefully because you could end up working together for a long time.

Top 10 tips

Know your stage.There are two stages you should understand: the concept stage and the go-big stage. In the first, you’re starting out with little more than an idea, so venture capitalists aren’t likely to invest without serious revenue. In the second, you should be generating robust income andgreater interestfrom VCs.

Build your brand.Think about positioning, messaging, graphics, and consistency. Don’t worry about getting confined to a single approach. It canchange as your company evolves.

Foster relationships.What creates trust? The human elements of reliability, relationships, and ethicality. Never lose these values in the marketplace rush. People build relationships around what Jon calls “the five Fs:”family, friends, food, fun, and fellowship. Keep these top of mind and leverage them.

Be an interest magnet.Don’t beg. Focus on building a company where people reach out to you as a trusted advisor around your company’s brand promise and areas of expertise.

Cultivate influencers.As Malcolm Gladwell noted in The Tipping Point,some people are better cultural influencers than others—be it locally (e.g., a niche blogger) or nationally (e.g., Mark Cuban). Be sure to include analysts, bloggers, prominent investors, and thought leaders in your circle of interaction.

Put others’ interests first.Dale Carnegie saidit back in the 1950s: Know what people care about before talking about yourself. It’s your startup, but you’ve got to sell it in terms of others’ interests. After all, it’s their money.

Leverage social networking.Without consciously networking and leveraging social media across channels, your messaging becomesoff-base and ineffective. Jon notes that without social networking, he couldn’t have built a relevant or authentic brand, network, or community. As important as social networking and media were a few years ago, they’re even more important today.

Don’t partner with investors—marry them.Picking the right investors is as critical as picking theright spouse. A worthwhile investment partner has to weather market shocks and startup pivots for the long haul.

Startups aren’t charities.Investors give money to those who don’t need it but who are ready to scale. Don’t take money too early and spend too much of it. VCs expect you to deliver growth.

Do your homework.Prepare for pitches by staying current on your space and reading your term sheets to define investment amounts, ownership, board, etc.As Jon advises, “Read every word and understand it—withouta lawyer.”

With these tips in mind, time to dip your toes in the investment waters and get your ideas and passions off the ground. Remember, this isn’t a solo journey: Lean on friends, family, co-founders, team members, and mentors as you seek investment and write the next rewarding chapter in your startup venture.

Has your company found investment success? Share your story with #MSPartnerStory and connect with the Microsoft Partner Communityhere.

4 Nimble Growth Hacks for Small Businesses with Minuscule Budgets

By Jenna Dobkin

Based on the collective wisdom of four social sales luminaries, as well as my personal experience growing the Nimble brand, I believe the most pivotal growth hack is the ability to cultivate meaningful relationships at scale. Striving to be an influential thought leader with the best interest of others in mind is a surefire way to become a more nimble salesperson and close more deals, faster.

Here are four tried and true growth hacks to grow your business today:

Build Your Personal Brand

“Add value in excess of what you’re asking for in return,” advises Koka Sexton, Senior Manager of Content at Slack. “The best way to do so is to educate and inform people on best practices and solve bigger problems.” –

Koka believes that in order to fill the pipeline, customer-facing sales and marketers must first create a personal brand in the context of your brand promise to drive results. In the process of teaching someone to fish, they will also learn that you sell fishing poles.

Building your perceived value and amplifying your voice by inspiring and educating others on what you’re passionate about is the simplest way to do this. Schedule relevant, compelling content using a social media tool like Hootsuite to spur thoughtful conversations, and engage the people who engage you. As a next step, use a sales intelligence tool like DiscoverOrg, InsideView, or Nimble to figure out who among the respondents are people you want to build win-win relationships with.

Engage in Twitter Prospecting

CPP Digital co-founder and CMO Travis Wright knows the value of mining social media to find prospective buyers to grow your business. A great way to find these opportunities is by following relevant hashtags to see who is posting about topics that pertain to your business or industry. There are many different tools to help identify engagement opportunities within the ever-changing social media landscape.

“One of my favorite tools out there is content analytics platform BuzzSumo,” he said. “You can get a lot of great data from the tool, including who shares certain articles. I take a look at those sharers and sort them by who is most relevant.”

Travis then creates custom lists of the sharers that he uncovers through BuzzSumo in his Twitter, whom he eventually serves relevant ads to as a means to generate leads. He also uploads those same lists into Nimbleinorder to discover social business insights about his potential leads such as company background, areas of influence, and contact information.

Using enriched data to qualify leads, Travis focuses on building relationships with his most promising contacts. He effectively turns a cold call into a warm handshake.

Build Authentic Relationships with A-List Prospects, at Scale

“…Most salespeople are indiscriminate in their follow-up.” The keynote sales speaker, author, and sales trainer prioritizes follow-ups and ensures he follows-through with critical clients by categorizing people into three buckets: contacts who make up 80% of his business (“A’s”), beneficial contacts who are great to call on but not as revenue-driving as his top tier (“B’s”), and prospects who can be followed up with at the next networking convention (“C’s”).

Shane schedules reminders to send consistent outreach to his “A’s” once every three weeks. He’ll share an interesting article, invite them to a webinar, or even send a lead their way. By scheduling tasks weeks and months ahead of time, this strategy draws its strength from building relationships incrementally and increases conversions.

Connect Meaningfully to Create Value

Service is the new sales, according to People First Productivity Solutions President Deb Calvert. “You can’t help but be successful if you create more value for buyers by achieving mutually beneficial, measurable goals.” She contends that your prospective clients want sellers to be leaders; if you exhibit the behaviors of a leader with authority over your areas of expertise, buyers are more liable to book more meetings to further their relationship with you, enabling you to close more deals. A personal CRM enables you to not only maintain your relationships, but also to conduct targeted outreach to key people within your industry who can benefit from your areas of expertise.

Some would argue that growth hacks are only effective when few people know about them, and that they lose power once they’re adopted by the mainstream. I would argue that while technologies and specific social media networks continue to evolve at a dizzying pace, the fundamental focus on humanity, authenticity, and relationships are here for the long haul.

Jenna Dobkin is an experienced influencer marketing professional with a passion for helping businesses acquire customers, build brands and enhance community relationships, both online and in the real world. Hallmarks of her work include conscientious relationship building; strategic content marketing; and the delivery of multi-platform social media and public relations campaigns from inception through execution.

Currently, she heads up influencer marketing and guerilla PR for Nimble, the simple social CRM for Office 365 and G Suite. Jenna is also a nerd. She graduated top of her class from the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in the early nineties.

Nimble, the pioneering Social Sales and Marketing CRM built forOffice 365andG Suite, announced that it has been named the Top Sales Intelligence Software Tool for Customer Satisfaction and overall Market Leader for the 5th consecutive time byG2 Crowd, the world’s leading business software reviews platform. Nimble achieved top customer satisfaction rankings according to verified user reviews and a market presence in multiple categories, including:

#1 Among Top 20 Easiest-to-Use Sales Intelligence Software tools. Nimble earned a 9.01 out of 10 usability score based on a G2 Crowd proprietary algorithm, which factors in satisfaction ratings regarding how user-friendly the product is, how easy it is to administer, and how well the product meets business requirements. Users reported an 80% adoption rate versus a 71% category average.

#1 Most Easily Implemented Sales Intelligence Software for Small Business*. Nimble scored the highest overall implementation score with a 9.43 out of 10 based on ease of setup, shortest implementation time, and end-user adoption.

Leader in Sales Intelligence Software Based on User Satisfaction. In the small business category, Nimble earned a 95% user satisfaction score, outpacing competitors including Winmo, DiscoverOrg, Relpro, ZoomInfo, Lead 411, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

#1 Sales Intelligence Tool based on ROI, according to a real-time analysis of result-related review questions.

Jon Ferrara“We are grateful to the many Nimble customers who continue to share their experiences using Nimble as a sales intelligence tool for smarter prospecting, everywhere they work,” said Nimble CEOJon Ferrara. “Earning top customer satisfaction ratings for sales intelligence for the fifth consecutive time is a strong testament that our continuous innovations in sales intelligence bring us closer to our vision of becoming the world’s simply smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite.”

Michael Fauscette

“Rankings on G2 Crowd reports are based on data provided to us by real users,” saidMichael Fauscette, Chief Research Officer, G2 Crowd. “We are excited to share the achievements of the products ranked on our site because they represent the voice of the user and offer terrific insights to potential buyers around the world.”

Rich Bohn“There are millions of salespeople who have yet to discover exactly how sales intelligence and sales enablement tools like Nimble can improve their lives, which is a tremendous waste of effort,” saidRich Bohn, President/Chief CRM Analyst, Sell More Now, LLC. “Based on my professional opinion, and thousands of users agree, Nimble is quite simply the easiest-to-implement, easiest-to-use sales intelligence tool for small- and mid-size businesses on the market.”Also Read: Nimble CRM’s New Add-In for Outlook on iOS Will Deliver Unique Social Relationship Insights

AI-Enabled Innovation Delivers Even Smarter Prospecting

For years, teams and professionals have saved time using Nimble’s instant Live Profiles to qualify contacts based on personal insights, including work experience, social identities, areas of interest, and company data.

Prospector, Nimble’s newly released AI-assisted contact discovery and enrichment feature, introduces added convenience by enabling users to discover verified contact data, including business emails, phone numbers and locations, without having to toggle between applications.

Wes Schaeffer“While social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are a goldmine for uncovering valuable leads, it’s no small task to sift through various profiles in order to identify the right people and uncover contact details, company information and relevant icebreakers,” explainedWes Schaeffer, CEO of The Sales Whisperer. “With Nimble, I can immediately figure out if I want to connect with that person and how to build a relationship based on our common areas of interest. Without Nimble and Prospector, this process would easily take three to four times as long.”

Today, Nimble just made my life easier (again) with the release of a new dashboard that saves me even more time and lets me stay focused on ‘the next right thing.’

Nimble’s newly redesigned Today Page is an intuitive, all-in-one dashboard that delivers clear views of the pipeline and the people you plan to engage during today’s meetings, on tasks and via social media. You can communicate authentically with contacts and easily update team members directly from the dashboard.

Today Page Dashboard Overview

Here’s how the Today Page enables users to organize the day, focus on key relationships, and take progressive actions to close business more effectively:

Track Deals:Check the status of deals and your overall pipeline, and take progressive actions directly from your dashboard. Click to access engagement history and current insights on the people involved; update deal status, assign tasks, add notes or create new deals.

Follow-Up on Tasks: Follow through on today’s to-do’s to cultivate the right deals and connections, personally and at scale.

Prepare for Meetings:Glance through today’s appointments and the people you’re meeting. Get prepared by clicking on profiles to see social business insights, sales intelligence and history of communications with your entire team.

Network with Highlighted Contacts:Nimble recommends people to contact based on the parameters you’ve set, such as title, location, company or interests.

Nimble makes my professional life much easier to manage—and saves me so much time. That’s what I love the most about it. The other thing, from a customer experience perspective, is that the development and product teams never let up on improving the product and putting in features that create more value for me. Watch Nimble as a case-study-in-the-making on how to do software development/customer experience right!

GoDaddy Leverages Nimble Social Insights in Outlook to Successfully Run Their Social Influencer Programs

While GoDaddy helps small businesses build and grow their ventures, they felt they could do more to position their Advocacy and Evangelism team to scale for growth to assist more customers to achieve their goals. GoDaddy added Nimble to their web and outlook workflow to support their strategies and processes.

When Heather Dopson, GoDaddy Community Builder, and experienced Nimble user came on board, she explored opportunities for her small but mighty team to be more efficient in building their influencer program. In order to meet the company’s new objectives and build a pipeline of influencers both internal and external, she developed a plan to leverage more of Nimble’s functionality, automate their processes, and define new user protocols to enable GoDaddy to collaborate and share information across the team in terms of conversations, social insights and contact records, with the objective of making it easier to identify and work with key influencers, manage relationships and measure interaction.

With Heather’s assessment of the company’s current requirements, she optimized their Nimble configuration to better support GoDaddy’s current processes and business strategies. To ensure behavior change, Heather established the business case for how and why the team should be using Nimble and trained everyone on the team to adhere to standardized processes for research, data capture, and influencer interaction.

“We have a focus and commitment to being the best at what we are here to do, which is building our influencer program, and Nimble is 100 percent a part of that.”Heather explains.

“We have evolved from using Nimble as a database to taking advantage of it as a way to measure engagement and interaction, as well as a way to move people through a pipeline. I’m very excited to see the influencer program continue to progress in Nimble so that it’s easy and efficient for us to achieve our goals.”

Now GoDaddy uses Nimble to profile key influencers, track the contact information and history of interactions, and walk in their social footprints to get to know them, simplifying the research and management of influencers.

GoDaddy also integrates Nimble with Sprinklr for social listening, posting and reporting, rounding out their social media capabilities.

Nimble has helped GoDaddy build a process around their influencer program and centralize the information to make it more accessible. The company now has employee and external influencers, along with their Klout Score, in Nimble. Klout Score is a key metric in identifying industry influencers which GoDaddy uses to easily search and sort on to obtain information such as the top 10 external or employee influencers to present to their executive team.

GoDaddy also created an influencer index scorecard that contains profile information and influencer criteria on each contact such as the number of followers, level of engagement, authorship and speaking experience. Based on a calculation they developed, each contact is assigned an influencer index score.

As a result, GoDaddy has the ability to easily access a contact record in Nimble and see the influencer criteria all in a central location. By identifying geographic location, local employees can reach out to influencers in their area or at events, they are attending, improving their relationship building efforts.

“Having the influencer information organized and in one place where we can pull it from has been very helpful. Nimble has allowed us to scale the amount of work we’ve been able to manage. We’ve become more efficient and productive as a result, without adding resources,”Heather notes.

The GoDaddy team agrees Nimble is the right tool to support the company’s influencer program and continued quest to leverage the power of social media to build meaningful relationships.

How a SaaS CRM Startup Found Its Way Into Office 365 – with Jon Ferrara

How a SaaS CRM Startup Found Its Way Into Office 365

Jon Ferrara is the founder and CEO of Nimble CRM. Jon is a serial entrepreneur, who started his first company in 1989 with just $5000 and went on to sell it for $125 million.

Around 2001, a year after selling this startup, he was diagnosed with a tumor in his head. Life and his priorities quickly changed for him.

Thankfully he made a full recovery and went on to launch another startup in 2009. He set out to build a social sales and marketing CRM product in a very crowded market.

He had the vision of creating a product that you would live in for your email, social media and other communication. But that plan didn't work out, so he had to pivot.

He also built great integration with Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. But after a while, LinkedIn cut off their API access and Facebook severely restricted theirs. So he had to do a mini-pivot again.

In other words, even though he had a very successful exit with his first startup, it hasn't made it any easier for him to build his second company. And he's faced a lot of challenges, like any of us would face or are dealing with right now.

But he's kept going. And recently after years of trying, he has built a partnership with Microsoft which could be massive for his business in the next couple of years.

He was one of the very first guests on this show in 2014. And I'm delighted to have had him back and given me the chance to catch up on the ups/downs of his business over the last 3 years.

The Show Notes

GoDaddy Influencer Scoring with Nimble

By Den Howlett, April 3, 2018

GoDaddy, which in recent years has pivoted away from being a domain registrar and web hosting company to one with aspirations to provide all the digital infrastructure that a startup or SMB is likely to need, is using Nimble as part of its quest to prospect for potential community advocates. Here’s how.

Influencer scoring

GoDaddy has an outreach marketing team that endeavors to discover micro-vertical markets where there are opportunities to provide services. Heather Dopson, who is a Community Builder at GoDaddy explains:

We developed a proprietary score card that we call an influencer index score with different points of information in it. Just to be clear, when I’m talking about influencers in this capacity I’m not talking about celebrity endorsements or anything like that, I’m talking about micro-influencers. People who have a community in which they have a vested interest for success, and someone with whom we can build a relationship to help them and their community succeed.That might include people who are helping others with adjacencies – hair stylists to use the makeup artist example – or website developers who specialize in micro-verticals.

As we know for ourselves, the discovery and assessment process for assessing influencers is far from easy, is not an exact science and can easily be subject to biases. GoDaddy overcomes some of the inherent issues by using a continually iterating process it applies to score both external influencers and internal advocates who are – or wish to become – influencers in their own right.

It’s just like anything you do on social, what we were doing and how we were thinking six months ago is not what we need to be doing right now. It just doesn’t work the same.

Source of truth

As we’ve noted before, Nimble is almost platform like in the sense you can approach it from a variety of angles. So where does Nimble fit into this particular use case?

We call it our source of truth for keeping track of and documenting influencers. Let’s take our top 25 employees based on the score that we’ve given them as an example. We can sort those top 25 employees so that when there is an upcoming event we can readily see who is going to be a right fit.

When attending an event, an employee will have certain KPIs that are conversational in nature. That data is captured and goes towards the next score assessment.

I think keeping track of, if this person went to an event what was their performance like, or what are their specific skills? We may have somebody whose better suited to go to a WordPress event, than to go to a small business event, or vice-versa, so keeping track of all that information in there is a vital part of the decision process.

Nimble as a research tool

Beyond that, the team also use Nimble as a research tool. For instance, Nimble can tell the team the number of influencer followers on Instagram and Twitter along with their topics of expertise.

Before I go to an event, I will use Nimble to discover people that may have in the database who are in that area. They may not be participating in the particular event or even be associated with that event’s content, but the information we already have helps determine whether there is value in making a face to face connection as part of relationship development.When assessing an individual account, Dopson is clear that engagement matters. In her view, it is not enough that a person has a strong following or is pushing out interesting information.

We value the conversations we see occurring because they tell us a great deal about a person’s ability to make connections and both advocate and encourage. We see those traits as vital to find people who are passionate community builders.

Assessing social

As we were discussing this topic, I wondered how GoDaddy is navigating the social world at a time when major networks like Facebook and LinkedIn are becoming closed off, walled gardens and where Twitter is a place where you are either engaging with like-minded people (that seems to be most these days) or actively finding others who are curious.

Dopson agreed that it is ‘constant topic of discussion’ but says Twitter activity around events remains incredibly useful, especially when it is captured inside Nimble. I’d agree with that for some events but the mega-events are not as easy to parse as smaller events, largely because the signal to noise ratio often plummets. However, I can see that by restricting conversation capture to contacts already inside the Nimble system provides a clear value.

Reporting as a differentiator

I was aware going into our conversation that Dopson has experience of a variety of CRM and marketing automation products but I was curious to know why Nimble stood out.

I love Nimble because of its simplicity to use, but also its robust capability. I think that it is a tool that everybody is capable of using, and should be using. Apart from flexible capabilities, especially from a reporting aspect,the price point is phenomenalAsked to elaborate on reporting, Dopson said that GoDaddy is able to sort across multiple dimensions that make up the influencer score alongside the Top XX influencers. this allows users to get granular insights into topics of interest. In the long term, Dopson hopes that GoDaddy will be able to use Nimble as a way of discovering the influencer equivalent of marketing hot leads, the up and comers that it believes are critical to community building.

Advice for others

In closing, I was interested in getting Dopson’s advice for others because one problem we perceive at diginomica is the possibility of becoming overwhelmed with what Nimble can deliver. That’s not a unique problem but one that requires careful handling.

I think it’s important to have a base understanding of what your goals are in the tool, meet those first, and then as you discover more functionality inside the tool, or you discover more needs for your information, learn how to use the tool to shape the next steps. As I said earlier, Nimble is very easy to pick up but it is evolving rapidly and so we believe it’s important to get proper training.

My take

We’ve been playing with Nimble for a while developing use cases that are similar to that described by Dopson so we are keenly aware of the challenges she describes. Sharing those experiences proved valuable because they allowed me to expand my thinking about what a CRM should be like in a socially moderated world.

Anyone who has usedNimbleknows it represents an unusual take on the well-worn CRM moniker. Conceived by Jon Ferrara, the inventor ofGoldMine, a 20th century CRM, Nimble CRM focuses on the idea of ‘social selling.’

Nimble CRM starts with the thesis that the key to building a relationship with both potential and actual customers lies in understanding the relationships that exist inside social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn. It sounds simple, but once you get into Nimble, there’s a lot on offer.

We have been playing with Nimble for a while but with so much on offer, we thought it more instructive to speak with customers who are using the solution in different ways.

Headhuntr.io – the background

First up, I spoke with Oliver Deng, CEO and co-founderHeadhuntr.io. He has an interesting perspective because Deng has used a plethora of CRM solutions in his professional career and can speak with authority on the comparative value that Nimble delivers. Some background.

Salesify is a sales intelligence company, mostly aimed at high tech. We took profiles from all around the world, processed those to tell you which companies use which technology products and then who within those companies are in charge of those products.

Headhuntr.io takes the same idea of aggregating and mining data but this time for recruiting purpose. In Headhuntr.io we’re really figuring out what roles, skills, and products people know, based on business social networks like LinkedIn, Xing and Viadeo. We are processing some 300 million profiles, tagging and categorizing those folks. That enables recruiters to quickly find the most qualified people from a data perspective and in–turn allows the recruiting team to pre-qualify, based upon implied skills.

Deng maintains this works because job postings are usually explicit about requirements which can be pattern matched from the personal job experience information individuals include in their business-centric social graph.

Automating candidate discovery

However, individuals don’t usually list every product or service with which they are experienced. Even so, Deng claims that information can be inferred from corporate data about current and recently past employment. Moreover, Deng claims that the majority of hires are not coming from job applicants but from what he terms ‘passive applicants,’ people who are not actively seeking a new challenge but may well fit specific profiles. That intuitively makes sense in a tight talent economy and reflects some of the practices I’ve seen in new department setups inside large organizations.

Headhuntr.io’s trick is to automate the candidate discovery element of the hiring process which would otherwise require manual – and error-prone – labor. It also means that headhuntr.io can help companies reduce the competitive risks inherent in markets where skills are in high demand.

Choosing Nimble CRM

Deng enjoyed a long career at large enterprise and given that experience coupled with the sophisticated and complex nature of the problems Headhuntr.io is solving, I wondered why he chose Nimble over other solutions.

I’ve been on Salesforce, Oracle CRM and Siebel. Salesforce has all the bells and whistles but when we implemented it, the solution ended up quite expensive. And for all those bells and whistles on offer, how many people really use all those features? Conceptually it’s a neat idea but when it comes down to, “Can you spot an opportunity, what intelligence is this producing?” I just felt that it doesn’t really help the sales team in terms of, “How do I figure out …?”

At the last company, I knew we were not going to do Salesforce. We went to the other extreme, opting for Zoho. A great product at an amazing price point but while it is certainly a jack of all trades, I didn’t feel it was master of many. So this time around I wanted a system that allows the business users to be their own admins. Nimble’s ability to bring over LinkedIn profile data was a critical piece of the decision.

Given Microsoft acquired LinkedIn in 2016, I wondered why Microsoft Dynamics didn’t figure into the decision. Deng says that while the company uses Microsoft Office 365, Headhuntr.io’s ambitious growth plans meant that Dynamics was prohibitively expensive.

But cost and the obvious benefits of the LinkedIn compatibility aside, I wanted to get Deng’s take on Nimble’s ‘conversational’ nature, since this is one of the main selling points. In large company deals, there are many points of influence towards what the salesperson hopes will be a large deal. We know this already, based on our many years’ experience dealing with enterprises. What’s less well understood is that each of those points of influence is also a potential sales target. How do salespeople respond to these opportunities? They usually don’t.

Deep mining for cross and upselling

Headhuntr.io has developed a novel approach to handling these types of cross-sell opportunities. Instead of having salespeople who are allocated geographical or corporate territories, sales personnel are experts in specific roles. They don’t need to view the company as their target. Rather they view the functional heads across many companies as targets.

When we go in with Nimble, we have people that specialize in say cybersecurity so they’re focused on the IT security department. We will have another person that’s focused on finance, talking to the finance people within the same account. So now, we eliminate the problem of sales reps getting territorial about accounts while opening up many more opportunities.

Depending on how recruiting is handled by the company Headhuntr.io typically approaches the hiring managers because those are the people that have the hiring pain of unfilled positions. In organizations where recruiting is centralized Headhuntr.io approaches through the talent acquisition people.

The data-driven business

As we concluded our discussion, I asked Deng to summarize where Nimble fits into a modern business:

If you’re a business that is fundamentally data-driven for the purposes of optimizing your sales performance then, other things aside that you might want to see in a CRM, Nimble might well be enough. We are always pushing the limits of how Nimble’s shared platform responds to the amount of data we throw at it but so far the company has been incredibly accommodating. You’re not going to get that from other vendors.

My take

Nimble puts conversation at the center of customer relationships. For its part, Headhuntr.io represents a class of business that not only relies upon the social signals it mines about people and places, it consumes a lot of that data in order to apply its magic to the problem of prospecting deep inside companies. To that extent, expect to see Nimble tested for its ability to scale in terms of absolute amounts of data it can process quickly enough for salespeople to seize the appropriate moment.

How Artificial Intelligence Is Scaling Human Communication The Right Way

Bryan Kramer | Community Voice | Forbes Coaches Council

When it comes to digital infrastructure and the relationship we have with it, it feels as if we’re at an important crossroads right now.There are a lot of conversations going on about the impact that emerging and currenttechnology will have on our society, particularly the untold consequences and whether we really want the future that’s being proposed to us.

I think of it like this: The point of technology isn’t to move us further away from communicating with each other but rather to bring us together more easily.

Is this idea becoming lost in translation? And if so, what can we do about it?

All you have to do is watch an episode of the popular Netflix series Black Mirror to see some outlandish future scenarios for humanity and tech. The show's creators expertly play on current unsettling themes around our use of tech and run with them to create a dystopian reimagining of the digital landscape. But one of the key takeaways is that technology isn't inherently bad -- it’s bad if we choose to use it in bad ways.

While Black Mirror is fictional and based on eccentric storytelling, that’s not to say that we shouldn’t take notice of some warnings concerning the tech community and be cautious with our approach. Just look at real-life examples of various Facebook and Google ex-employeesgoing on the record to questionthe software they’ve helped to create. Tristan Harris, ex-Google, said, “We need our smartphones, notifications screens and web browsers to be exoskeletons for our minds and interpersonal relationships that put our values, not our impulses, first."

Communication Re-Defined

Think about how you interact in an office. Messaging apps like Slack probably improve your workflow, but as Basecamp CEO Jason Fried wrote, "Group chat is like being in an all-day meeting with random participants and no agenda." Are workers missing out on defined meetings with face-to-face participation where we can make meaningful relationships and tackle the subtle art of good conversation? Are they just sending emojis around instead?

AmirSalihefendic, CEO of Doist used Slack with his team but decided to leave the app after two years. It was affecting real communication between employees — it was addictive, demanded instant answers, promoted shallow conversations and wasn’t really about having transparent conversations at all, as there was too much content. Employees are spending on average 10 hours a dayin the app.

There’s a lesson to learn here: Amir and his team designed a new messaging app that worked for them. It allowed people to have time off from the app (they didn’t include an indicator of someone’s online status) and was built on promoting well-being and productivity. They made their tech more human-centric.

Software That Promotes Real Connections

In my experience, some software is already built with that in mind. The idea behind them is to help improve communication and help us make space for relationship building. These are my favorite programs and uses for tech-enabled human connection in the workplace. (Full disclosure: I've consulted the team at Lately.)

I use X.AIto build a virtual artificial assistant — her name is Amy — and she (I say she but it’s a robot) actually eliminates hours of my time that used to be spent finding a time to meet with someone. Amy stays on the case until something is booked. All of my information is fed in and the software knows my conference numbers, phone number and Skype address. With one email, you could be saving hours, which leaves more time to work on other things. AI can help connect people faster and more efficiently than a single person could. The technology used is AI, but the consequence is face-to-face communication.

Nimble is a CRM tool that helps you find the right contact and stay in touch with them. It gives you methods of measuring your level of interaction with someone, and then it has AI that reminds you to make sure you keep in touch.Nimble also lets you find the right contact information faster much faster than if you're doing it manually. Essentially, you'll be reminded to chat and connect with people.

Nudge analyzes your entire network and points you in the direction of new, useful relationship opportunities. You can receive real-time information about notable people in your own network and in friends' networks, too. Thismoves you closer toward new, interesting and valuable relationships — on top of updates about what’s going on in their world, giving you subjects to connect over.

OutreachPluslets you send out emails to multiple people simultaneouslyfrom your own email account, and the best part is that you can personalize each email. There are unlimited variables and follow-up sequences you can address automatically, which saves you time lets you concentrate on making connections with people based on their interests — a much more personal approach.

Lately is able to take an entire article or blog post and create several different combinations of social media posts for you within seconds usingIBM's Watson AI software. With the amount of time it takes to make posts for every one of your brand's social network profiles, a solution like this enables you to focus more on the actual content and create engaging posts.

Final Thoughts

So, back to the crossroads — which path are we going to take? My view is that we need to keep building and using tech that allows us to be better humans, not tech that shirks real conversation and keeps us behind a screen on messaging apps for 12 hours a day. If you can use tech that encourages you to keep in touch, make connections and build meaningful relationships, then your personal and professional life will be more wholesome.

We should use tech to unlock and enable conversation for better communication, not discourage it.

How Nimble is Your CRM?

Rieva Lesonsky, February 21, 2018

As entrepreneurs you know your work is never done. And while it may be easy to connect with clients when you’re sitting in your office, what if you’re on the road? Or sitting at your kid’s soccer game? Or at dinner with another client—or even your family?

Thanks to the newNimble Mobile CRM 3.0, which was just released last week, you’re never far from the information you need to help you make the sale or close the deal.

Nimbleis already a leading social sales and marketing customer relationship marketing (CRM) program for small businesses, which “unifies your mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into one comprehensive relationship manager” that also includes the history of your prior conversations and offers social context.

With this mobile app (available now on iOS, and this spring for Android devices), Jon Ferrara, Nimble’s CEO, wanted to create a way to cut through the clutter of everyday business tasks (stacks of business cards, streams of emails, incomplete contacts added to your current system and overloaded social media platforms) to better enable you or your salespeople to “understand [potential clients’] needs and deliver expedient, relevant responses.”

Ferrara, a pioneer of the CRM industry (he founded GoldMine, a CRM software program in 1989), says they “designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better prepared to manage personal business relationships at scale and take appropriate steps to evolve opportunities to help you grow.”

Nimble itself is an amazing tool, that gives your deeper insight—and intel into your contacts and those you want to form relationships with. Nimble Mobile, which works with Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s G Suite, is feature rich. Users get:

Access to “detailed dossiers,” which include, social insights about clients (potential and current), culled from your email, calendar, contacts and social apps (I love the way Nimble works with Twitter). Contact data sources include more than 100+ cloud-based business apps and social platforms.

The ability to instantly scan business cards and create a CRM record.

Work on the go. “Using the iOS Share Menu within mobile apps or browser, users can tap on Nimble to discover people’s social profiles, areas of influence, job title, company description and work experience.”

Everything syncs. You can review your history with the contact, because every email conversation, calendar activity and social interaction (whether they interacted with your or a member of your team) is automatically (or “automagically” as Ferrara likes to say) synched.

Save time by taking advantage of templated emails and pre-set attachments. You can also enable message tracking to monitor engagement.

Increase efficiency by managing sales in multiple pipelines. You can use mobile voice commands, assign tasks and schedule reminders.

Pricing

If you already have a Nimble business account, addingNimble Mobile CRM 3.0is free—just download it from the App Store or Google Play store. If you don’t have a Nimble business account, look into signing up—it’s that helpful.

The News

On February 14, 2018 Nimble announced thelaunch of Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, their new powerful mobile contact, relationship and pipeline manager for Office 365 and G-Suite. The company alsoannounced a bundling of PieSync’s B2B cloud integration platform to become an end-to-end social relationship management platform for all company contact records, regardless of where those records are stored.

The new mobile app “unifies contacts from siloed mobile, cloud based and desktop records into a comprehensive relationship manager. It delivers the history of conversations and social context for everyone you meet, and it enables you to easily follow up and follow through on opportunities …”

Besides introducing important features like business card scanning, the ability to send templated and tracked emails, and a mobile pipeline manager for tracking follow-through, Nimble Mobile 3.0 provides easy access to all company contact records, including social enrichment and history of email and Twitter interactions. In addition, the software introduces the ability to research new contacts on the fly via a deep integration with the iOS share menu. The latter enables users to stay within one app instead of toggling between them, which is a drag on mobile productivity.

The ability to research new contacts on the fly gives teams and professionals valuable sales intelligence by using the iOS Share menu to “Nimble” a person, i.e. discover their social profiles, areas of influence, company, work description, etc. In other words, it is possible to build a Nimble record for contacts in your email, calendar and contacts apps, on the Internet or for a variety of other apps, in real time.

The application isavailable for iOSnow and will be available for Android later this spring.

Bundling of PieSync into Nimble extends Nimble’s ability to sync conversations with contact data from more than 100 SaaS applications.

The Bigger Picture

Salespeople are mobile by definition. They need to have access to all the relevant information to initiate or close a deal at their fingertips. On the road, they are likely to use a tablet or smartphone; fewer rely on a laptop. They surely cannot rely on data that is locked up in a back office database.

Sales is, and always has been, a relationship play. However, in a B2B world the process typically includes an entire sales team, and not just a single person.

There is also more to a CRM than just contact management and sales. A true 360 degree view of the customer needs to include data from all business applications and social sources. To accommodate for this, Nimble has partnered up with PieSync to be able to sync contact data from more than 100 business SaaS apps into Nimble. This allows Nimble to become a part of an ecosystem of applications that enables especially small companies to run their complete business in the cloud, and to grow from there.

My PoV and Analysis

Now, every CRM or only SFA application that is worth their salt offers a mobile component. What distinguishes Nimble Mobile 3.0 is its ability to integrate into the iOS Share menu and to immediately build new contact records for data stored in multiple sources. The new contact is only two clicks away.

What impressed me most, though, was the sheer performance this process showed. Surely, Santa Clara is a lot closer to the big Internet pipes than Christchurch, NZ, but still … I walked away from the briefing feeling impressed.

The ability to build new contact profiles for mobile contacts alone makes Nimble Mobile 3.0 the most powerful contact management tool I have seen so far.

The only minus that I could see is that Nimble customers need to wait a little longer for an Android version.

Nimble is squarely targeting small companies that are looking at a fast growth trajectory. Because they are focused on social contact and relationship management Nimble’s partnership with PieSync is almost as important as the partnership with Microsoft. It makes Nimble part of an ecosystem of SaaS vendors that jointly enable small companies to run their businesses in the cloud, with ample opportunity to grow. This, as well as a growing number of reseller agreements likethis oneannounced earlier this week with Giacom, is an important move that should spur additional growth for Nimble.

It also makes Nimble somewhat less dependent on Microsoft.

All in all small businesses that consider social contact management as a core part of their business strategy and that are pursuing a best-of-breed IT strategy over an IT suite now get even more value. Nimble’s mobile app is very strong, as is the integration capability that is delivered via PieSync. Lastly, growing companies have a clear path to enterprise scale software via Nimble’s partnership with Microsoft.

To make CRM applications more enticing to salespeople, Nimble developed what it describes as contact relationship management software that makes it simple for salespeople to leverage CRM applications, calendars and social media networks to instantly know more about a potential prospect. The company has extended that effort viaa 3.0 update to the mobile edition of Nimble CRMthat adds, among other things, the ability to scan business cards to instantly to create a record in a CRM application as well as immediately access any email or calendar reference involving a specific customer.

In general, Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara says the way salespeople sell is now forever changed in the age of social media. Making random cold calls to try to drive business is simply ineffective, says Ferrara. Most end customers won’t pick up a phone today unless they know who is on the other end of the line.

“The day when salespeople made calls to close is dead,” says Ferrara.

Instead of making random cold calls, salespeople now leverage social media along with a variety of personal productivity applications, email, and CRM software to make offers that are much more relevant to the needs of individual customers. That approach, however, requires additional research that Nimble software makes much simpler to accomplish, says Ferrara.

Because Nimble as a plug-in piece of software makes the data residing in the CRM application now more accessible and relevant to the sales team, Ferrara says, resistance to the CRM application drops accordingly.

Most salespeople today are essentially keeping two sets of records. There’s the data they collect and then the data they enter in a CRM application to get paid. The gap between what a salesperson knows about a customer and what’s in the CRM application may never get fully closed. But as sales motions become more tightly wrapped up with more social media, a unique opportunity to narrow that gap is now presenting itself.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 works on the same premise as the desktop version of the platform. But instead of being tethered to your desk computer, the app goes with you wherever you or your team goes.

“We designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better prepared to manage personal business relationships at scale and take appropriate steps to evolve opportunities to help you grow,” says Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara.

More often, you’re on the road meeting clients and potential new clients to grow your business. And while you’re on the go, the chances of losing files, contact names, phone numbers, emails and other information vital to the future of your relationship with that client hangs in the balance … or maybe it’s tucked under the seat of your car … or you accidentally washed it with the laundry because it was in your back pocket.

“Many professionals lose deals because they either fail to understand prospective buyers’ needs or neglect to deliver a timely, relevant response,” explains Ferrara. “We designed Nimble Mobile to enable people to cultivate relationships and close deals more effectively by unifying critical contact records and conversation histories into a single, easy-to-access system of record that helps you make authentic connections and organize follow-up and follow-through at every stage of the deal pipeline.”

No more, if the new Nimble Mobile 3.0 app does its job properly for you.

Here’s what is new in the app:

No App Flipping

Nimble Mobile 3.0 works inside many of the apps you already use for your business. That means you don’t have to flip back and forth between Nimble and the apps you use every day when you’re on the go. It’ll work wherever the iOS Share menu is supported.

Scan Business Cards

There are plenty of apps to scan business cards you receive but few are smart enough to log that info right into your other apps. Nimble Mobile 3.0 will create a new CRM profile for a new contact by scanning the card and locating all their pertinent information.

Know Your Contacts Right Away

If you’re in another app or using your mobile browser, tap Nimble in the iOS Share menu to discover information about the people you meet. It’ll show you their social profiles, where they’re influential, their job title, and more.

All the conversations your team has with contacts is ready right away from Nimble Mobile 3.0. The app syncs the data and conversations you or your team has with a contact. If someone is at their desk or at the office and you’re on the go, you’ll have updated records with you right away via the Nimble app.

Email Templates and Tracking

You can load in email templates to send messages fast right from Nimble Mobile 3.0. The app also allows you to track those conversations as they’re updated.

Manage Deals

The app allows users to track sales deals across several different pipelines. It also receives voice commands to add notes to a client’s record. You can also add tasks for other team members or yourself to follow-up with a contact later.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 is available on the Apple App Store right now and the company says it’ll be available for Office 365 and GSuite users on Android this Spring. The app is free to use for Nimble Business subscribers. If you’re using Nimble Contact, you’ll need to upgrade to Nimble Business to use the mobile app.

Nimble Mobile CRM Gets Desktop Browser Features

By Richard AdhikariFeb 15, 2018

Nimble on Wednesday released Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, its contact and pipeline manager for mobile sales teams and professionals. It is available for iOS now. A version for Android device users will be released in the spring.

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 unifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into one comprehensive relationship manager that surfaces the histories of conversations and provides social context. It also introduces the sales intelligence, sales enablement, and marketing automation features available in our Web app to mobile Office 365 and G Suite users," said spokesperson Jenna Dobkin.

"Our goal is to enable [users] to be as effective and efficient at managing relationships on the road as they are in the office," she told CRM Buyer.

Features and Functionality

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 offers the following capabilities:

Gives users access to detailed dossiers about people they're going to meet, including historical email and Twitter conversations and social insights from email, calendar, contacts, social apps and anywhere the iOS Share Menu is supported. Contact data sources include more than 100 cloud-based apps and social platforms, and there's no need to toggle between tabs or mobile apps;

Lets users use the iOS Share Menu within mobile apps or desktop browsers to discover a new contact's social profiles, areas of influence, job title, company description and work experience;

Allows users to review email, calendar and social contact history for sales intelligence. Automatically synchronizes every email conversation, calendar activity, and social interaction for each team member and every contact;

Lets users send tracked messages and templated emails with custom merge tag and pre-set attachments to save time. By default, every email sent through Nimble Mobile has the "Enable Nimble Tracking" on; and

Lets users manage multiple sales pipelines from the field.

Nimble Mobile 3.0 soon will add push notifications.

Current Nimble users get Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 free.

Technical Details

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 runs on iOS 9.0 or later. It is compatible with the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Users will need at least an iPhone 5 with 16 GB of memory, Dobkin said.

The Android version will run on any device running Android 4.0.3 or higher. Some of the mobile features, including multiple deal pipelines and smart calendars, already are available on Android, Dobkin pointed out. They can be accessed from Google Play.

Other features for Android currently are in development.

"Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 accesses the same data as the Nimble Web App on your desktop, so we recommend using Nimble's SaaS CRM in addition to the mobile app so you can access all your contacts, and sync new contacts and email and Twitter across platforms," Dobkin suggested.

Nimble works either as a standalone CRM or as a social business add-on to complement users' existing CRM packages.

Nimble Web and mobile data are stored in the cloud through Amazon Web Services.

Nimble mobile aims to tie everything together

by Ben Kepes

I first metJon Ferrara, CEO, and founder of Nimble, while he was still in the process of founding the company back in 2009. Ferrara almost invented the term CRM, he was the founder of GoldMine, the company that pioneered contact management and CRM back in the day. Fast forward and many things have changed, but what hasn’t is Ferrera’s view that B2B sales are predicated on relationships. In this world where we have so many communication methods to juggle, managing these relationships is harder than ever before.

And this is where Nimble comes in. The company has built a relationship management solution, designed for teams and individuals, that allows people to nurture both personal and business relationships – whether they happen across email, social networks, or a growing number of cloud-based business applications. Nimble fits into a range of categories – traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation – and brings them all together as a so-called “relationship management platform.”

The interesting thing that Nimble needs to contend with, however, is that increasingly, relationship management is happening on the move, and required a mobile-first approach. This is difficult for a number of reasons, as anyone who has tried to reconcile a desktop CRM user interface into a mobile form factor will tell you. True, the CRM companies are trying to move quickly to be mobile-friendly (witness Salesforce’s Lightning mobile offering) but it is a difficult task.

Given this situation, it is interesting to hear that Nimble is today releasing a new version of its mobile application, one that integrated the two main office productivity suites (Microsoft Office 365 and Google’s G-Suite) alongside the various social networks and a range of cloud applications. The idea is that all of those individual siloes can, once and for all, be brought together into a single consistent platform that gives social context, an overview of historical interactions and allows easy ongoing communication management. This version is (unfortunately for those of us toting an Android device) only available on iOS at this stage, with Android due later this spring.

Ferrara is quick to articulate his view on why both a consistent platform and a mobile offering is critical. In his words:

The single most effective way to kill a deal is neglecting to understand people’s needs and failing to deliver expedient, relevant responses. We designed Nimble Mobile as your personal CRM that you can take with you everywhere you work, so you’re better prepared to manage personal business relationships at scale and take appropriate steps to evolve opportunities to help you grow.

So, what has the Nimble team cooked up for us all in this new release? Firstly, Nimble is creating something of a mobile digital Rolodex. It offers up detailed dossiers that give users historical email and social conversations, as well as insights into contacts gleaned from a raft of different sources – both internal and external. Nimble is also including a hand business card scanning offering within the app – obviously, a lot of different vendors offer business card scanning, but building this into the CRM, so it can automatically collect the name, title, company, email, address, and phone numbers for a contact is super useful.

Nimble is also offering email control solutions, like those from Gmail plugins such as Streak and Boomerang. Users can send tracked messages and templated emails using email templates with custom merge tags and they can also pre-set attachments to email contacts. Nimble also enables message tracking to monitor engagement.

Nimble is awesome, and a super-useful tool for those that need to stay on top of contacts and conversations. But it’s not alone in the space. There are so many startups trying to solve mobile relationship management and, perhaps more worrying, every platform vendor under the sun is trying to do this as well.

It strikes me that the real opportunity for Nimble is to stay laser-focused on providing “just enough” for users and avoiding the temptation to become big and bloated like traditional enterprise CRMs are. Ferrara has a long pedigree in the space and has been at it for years – it will be interesting to see where Nimble eventually ends up.

Nimble Launches Mobile CRM 3.0

Mobile CRM 3.0 is the latest version of Nimble's mobile contact relationship and pipeline manager.

Nimble today launched Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0, the latest version of its mobile contact relationship and pipeline manager, designed to make it easier for users to surface business conversations and context from smartphones or other mobile devices. Now available for iOS, it will also be released for Office 365 and G-Suite users on Android this spring.

“I think the biggest cause of failure in CRM is lack of use. Sales reps don’t use it because they have to go to it to use it and it’s too much work to do it,” says Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “And I think that Nimble is the first CRM that works for you by building itself and then works with you wherever you’re working which increases the possibility, the probability of your sales reps using it.”

Nimble Mobile CRM 3.0 aims to serve as users’ “personal golden rolodex” to bring with them wherever they go. It enables them to access information such as historical email, Twitter conversations, and social insights about the people they’re meeting directly from their email, calendar, contacts, and social apps, as well as anywhere the iOS Share Menu is supported. Contact data sources are informed by more than 100 cloud-based business apps and social platforms.

The latest version also includes these features:

The ability to scan business cards to create new CRM records. Nimble builds records in seconds by collecting information including name, title, company, email, address, and phone number.

The ability to research new contacts on the go. Using the iOS Share Menu in a mobile app or browser, the user can tap on Nimble to view a person’s social media profiles, areas of influence, job title, company description, and work experience.

The ability to review email, calendar, and social contact history. Nimble automatically synchronizes email conversations, calendar activity, and social interactions for each team member and every contact, with the goal of making sales intelligence readily available.

The ability to send tracked messages and templated emails. With an eye on saving time, users can utilize email templates with custom merge tags and preset attachments to email contacts. Additionally, they can enable message tracking to monitor engagement.

The ability to manage multiple sales pipelines from the field. Users can manage sales across multiple pipelines, as well as log notes using mobile voice commands and assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders.

“Traditional CRM is hard to use because you have to do all the work and I think that’s why 99 percent of the world’s businesses out there don’t use any CRM,” Ferrara says. “Most people’s CRM is their inbox or spreadsheet, and Nimble’s changing that because we’re the first CRM that salespeople love to use.”

For more information on Mobile CRM 3.0, you can check out thisdemofrom Ferrara.

Build Relationships, Manage Deals and Grow Your Business The Nimble Way to Connect, Engage, Nurture and Close Customers While Mobile

Contact relationship management leaderNimblereleased Nimble CRM Mobile 3.0, a social sales and marketing CRM and pipeline manager for mobile teams and professionals. Nimble’s mobile CRMunifies contacts from mobile, cloud-based and desktop records into a unified relationship manager; delivers sales intelligence and detailed dossiers about people attending upcoming meetings; and enables users to follow up and follow-through more efficiently using Nimble’s visual pipeline manager. Now available on iOS, Nimble Mobile 3.0 for Office 365 and G-Suite users will be available on Android this spring.

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara, previously founder of GoldMine, the company that pioneered Contact Management and CRM, believes that B2B sales is and always have been based on relationships; namely, people buy from people they know, like and trust. Jon designed Nimble’s Mobile 3.0 CRM to help today’s increasingly mobile professionals to nurture relationships more easily and at scale, and simplify follow-up and follow-through while on-the-go using smaller, more mobile devices.

“Many professionals lose deals because they either fail to understand prospective buyers’ needs or neglect to deliver a timely, relevant response,” explainedJon Ferrara. “We designed Nimble Mobile to enable people to cultivate relationships and close deals more effectively by unifying critical contact records and conversation histories into a single, easy-to-access system of record that helps you make authentic connections and organize follow-up and follow-through at every stage of the deal pipeline.”

Nimble is a social sales and marketing customer relationship management (CRM) app that provides business intelligence about your contacts and their organizations so you can engage effectively with your customers and partners. We’ve optimized Nimble to work seamlessly inside Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. We help you easily deploy your CRM by syncing your team’s Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to engage.

We are on a mission to help companies modernize their sales and marketing to grow their businesses. We also add sales intelligence for teams that rely on Office for their daily tasks and communications through our add-in integrations for Outlook on the desktop, web app, and iOS. This means that Nimble acts as the home base for your email communications, calendars, sales opportunities, marketing campaigns, and sales intelligence data.

How does the Nimble Add-in work with Outlook?

With the Nimble add-in for Outlook, you can get insights on any contact included in Outlook, including broad social profiles, industry, shared relationships, mutual interests, company profile, revenue and more, to help you get prepared for meetings and engage effectively.. If you have an existing Nimble account or trial, you can also view and update records in your CRM without interrupting your email workflow.

Get business insights with the Nimble Add-in for Outlook:

Automatic matching of social and public details for people and companies

Instant business and social insights on people and companies in Outlook

Company insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year founded, keywords, company type, revenue, ticker, CEO name, address, and phone

People insights including person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities

“Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem, as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world,” said Rob Howard, Director, Office Product Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble Add-in for Outlook is a logical step.”

Use the Nimble Add-in for Outlook on iOS and Android to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact’s social business insights for people and companies, next to your inbox on the go.

Built for Microsoft Teams and Edge

Nimble is also better with Office via our integrations with Microsoft Teams and the Edge browser for Windows 10. Add Nimble to Teams to see critical contact details about an account without interrupting your internal chats.

Our Nimble Contacts browser extension for Edge lets you bring Nimble with you everywhere you work on the web.Hover over a contact to view social profiles, streams, and signals related to that person or company from a single screen. The extension automatically pulls and displays your complete communication history of social messages, emails, notes, and events for every contact in Nimble.

Introducing Nimble Prospector

Nimble, the social sales and marketing customer relationship management company, has just introduced Nimble Prospector to its cloud-based CRM. Nimble gathers your contacts from several popular business platforms like Gmail, G Suite and Office 365 as well as from your social media sites and other business applications.

Prospector even provides an overview of your team’s history of interactions with clients and contacts. For small business sales teams on the go, it’s like having another set of hands helping you to close deals.

“Nimble provides a layer and builds a relationship on email, calendar and ideally social to show a history of interactions for you and your team,” Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara told Small Business Trends. “It builds and maintains a relationship record.”

In short, it’s a CRM that can help busy small businesses’ sales teams with relationship management by creating and maintaining databases using AI. Nimble is also designed to reduce lost time spent putting this important kind of information together. It also verifies contact details and enriches contact information.

It allows small business sales people to beef up a contact’s info and reach out with a personalized email tailor made for each prospect. It filters and builds on data automatically.

A Closer Look at Nimble and Prospector

Here’s a deeper dive into the new Prospector tool from Nimble.

Company Profiles

There’s no need to look in several locations for the business info you need. You can target business contacts from a single location. Prospector gathers important metrics like number of employees and even revenue to keep everything current.

Auto-Generated Contact Profiles

Getting prospects’ work experience, education and social profiles helps to sort them out and qualify them. Nimble builds these profiles automatically.

Verification

There’s no need to chase down the right contact info with Prospector. The product does it for you and that’s another real time saver. Verifying business contact details like phone number and emails is done for information coming from any website or business source. It’s another way for small businesses to draw a straighter line to contacts that are most likely to pay off and get in touch quickly.

Works Where You Work

One of the more interesting features is the ability to access Nimble from different platforms.

Ferrara explains, “It works where you work. For example, if you open an email in Gmail, you can see the history of interactions you and the team have had. You can follow up and follow through from wherever you are.”

The Smart Contacts App

Everything is brought together with enriched contact details in the cloud through this application. Best of all, all the information is accessible from a sidebar with a single click.

You can even build segmented lists with tags and send out one-on-one emails. The Group Messaging feature even tracks emails and when they are opened. It also reminds users to follow up and tracks clicks.

“This application is the key,” Ferrara says. “Essentially it plugs into your browser and works inside your existing email systems or your social and business applications.”

Small businesses can get Nimble Prospector when they buy a Nimble Business License. The license comes with 25 lookups monthly with a pay-as-you-go option after that. The fees for Nimble Prospector start at $9:95 for an additional 50 lookups monthly. You can share them across a Nimble team account. Nimble comes with both mobile and desktop options.

The tool as already garnered some praise in the industry.

In comments supplied to Small Business Trends, Rich Bohn, President and Chief CRM Analyst atSell More Now LLCsays, “Too many CRM solutions still make the poor users do all of the work. This needs to end! These people are already way over worked. Thankfully, Nimble has been bucking this trend for a while.”

Wes Schaeffer, CEO ofThe Sales Whisperer, adds, “Time kills deals, so the more I can compress cycles and time frames, the more I can be productive and make more money. For example, when someone follows me on Twitter, I can use Nimble to immediately figure out if I want to connect with that person and how to build a relationship based on our common areas of interest.”

Nimble CRM, an innovative integrator of social platform and CRM data into popular office productivity suites, introduced a tool Thursday thatputs almost anyone's contact informationdirectly in front of the user.

Nimble Prospectordisplays in the corner of the screen email addresses and phone numbers of people encountered on LinkedIn, Facebook, inboxes or news articles.

Nimble founder and CEO Jon Ferrara, who helped pioneer CRM technology at GoldMine Software, said the new offering is intended to facilitate the often-difficult process of first connecting to prospective customers, or anyone else a small-business employee is interested in meeting.

Nimble unifies that "operating system around your business," he said, culling conversations and prior activities, mapping identity, importing data and synchronizing the entire history of interactions. "Then you can take that with you back inside your inbox or anywhere you're working," Ferrara said.

With Prospector, users just need to highlight a first and last name, as well as the individual's business domain (which the software suggests) to help Nimble's AI engine make an accurate identification.

Nimble then pulls addresses and phone numbers from business data repositories it subscribes to and accesses through APIs.

Prospector enhances the company's core customer-relationship product that ingests data from productivity tools such as email, calendars and contact lists, and integrates information from social platforms like LinkedIn, as well as sales and marketing platforms like Salesforce, to put comprehensive customer profiles and contact histories in front of users.

The startup, based in Santa Monica, Calif., launched a channel program in July to align with more solution providers in the Microsoft and Google channels. Since then, it's been selected to participate in Microsoft's Accelerator program that helps mature startups scale their businesses globally.

"Having a fully integrated CRM and all the tools, contact management, and now Prospector, in my view, it's an outbound prospector's dream," Murray told CRN.

Nimble's CRM, contact history and now contact discovery solutions benefit by bringing information directly into the user's email environment, where most outbound sales professionals still spend most of their working day, he added.

"The aggregation of contact information from different sources, the idea that you could have in seconds a one-click lookup for a contact, to me that's pretty differentiating. I don’t know of any other tool that does that," Murray told CRN.

Nimble, the award-winning pioneer of Social Sales and Marketing CRM, today introducedNimble Prospector, a powerful contact discovery and enrichment engine that uses artificial intelligence to enable Nimble users to build and update records for outbound prospects wherever they work, accelerating pipeline and revenue growth. Nimble’s newest AI assisted sales intelligence capabilities introduce the ability to append contact data including verified business emails, phone numbers, and addresses to comprehensive, auto-enriched profiles that can be added to Nimble CRM with a single click.

Key Features of Nimble Prospector — The Simply Smarter Way to Prospect

Small and medium-sized businesses can use Nimble’s end-to-end sales and marketing platform to qualify prospects using auto-generated people and business profiles; discover their verified business contact details; create enriched contact records and manage relationships in their cloud-based CRM; and outreach to prospects to fill the funnel and close more business. Specifically users can:

Target Businessesusing Company Profiles, including Biography, Industry, Number of Employees, Year Founded, Keywords, Company Type, Revenue, Ticker, CEO Name, Address and Phone

Qualify Prospectsusing auto-generated Contact Profiles, which include Biography, Location, Keywords, Work Experience, Education, and Social Profiles

Discover Verified Business Contact Details, including Emails, Phone Numbers and Address information from any website, social network or business web application

Enrich Contact Details in Nimble’scloud-based CRM with a single click from the Nimble Smart Contacts App browser extension

“The combination of sales and marketing solutions that small and medium-sized businesses have to use for outbound prospecting are too complex and expensive for 99% of most companies needs,”saidNimble CEO Jon Ferrara.“What companies need is a simply smarter CRM that combines social sales intelligence and group email marketing to help sales teams prospect, engage and close customers everywhere they work. This is what Nimble does, and it’s why we’re growing so quickly.”

Sales and Marketing Influencers Love Nimble Prospector

“Nimble is the first and only social CRM that truly understands the salesperson’s everyday workflows,”said Jorge Soto, co-founder and CEO of FirstCut.io. “This one-stop prospecting tool follows you everywhere you go while offering the CRM functionalities you need to do your job. Nimble’s prospecting capabilities enable you to quickly source leads and discover contact details across all your channels as well as export leads to the CRM, update contact statuses, set lead sources and more.”

“Nimble Prospector works on getting you the contact and social data about your buyers so you can focus less on research and more on selling.”Lori Richardson – Score More Sales

“OMG OMG OMG! How much do I LOVE Nimble’s new Prospector tool? I just started using it a few days ago and already it’s become an indispensable part of my prospecting and outreach. I have mentioned it to every single client (and prospect) I have spoken to since then too. And – for those of you who have Nimble and haven’t been using it as much as you can: This will be a game changer for you, too.”Viveka von Rosen, Social Selling Influencer, Co-Founder, Vengreso

Pricing and Availability

Nimble Prospector comes built into every Nimble Business license with 25 lookups per user per month with additional lookups on a pay-as-you-go basis. Prospector fees start at $9.95 for an additional 50 lookups per month and are shared across an entire Nimble team account.

Social sales and marketing software provider Nimble and cloud services consultant NeoCloud on Thursday announced a partnership to deliver a simple, affordable contact management and CRM package for Microsoft Office 365 and GSuite users.

NeoCloud has agreed to bundle Nimble CRM into all of its Office 365 deployments, beginning this month. Small and mid-sized business customers and workgroups in larger organizations will be able to access social business insights on any contact in Office 365 everywhere they work -- across the Web, in popular Web applications, and in personal productivity applications.

Nimble CRM adds employees' individual connections to a shared team relationship manager and enriches them with social insights and business context.

"What I like about Nimble's solution is that users continue to work through their usual tools such as email or social media platforms," said Cindy Zhou, principal analyst atConstellation Research.

They "gain context and information on individuals through Nimble plug-ins to facilitate social selling, adding or augmenting CRM records, and marketing," she told CRM Buyer.

Insights for Everyone

NeoCloud will provide sales, marketing and technical support services for the Nimble package.

Office 365 and GSuite are the two key business platforms NeoCloud sells, and virtually all of its customers need a simple relationship management platform that layers on top of those tools, said NeoCloud CEO Van Murray.

Nimble delivers relationship insights to users of the following products:

Microsoft Office 365

Microsoft Outlook

Chrome

Firefox

Safari

Edge

Hootsuite

iOS

Android

Nimble is available in two versions:

the Nimble Business Edition, which delivers access to team social sales and marketing functionalities, as well as social business insights on people and companies; and

a standalone freemium add-in for Microsoft Outlook Desktop and Outlook Mobile on iOS and Android, which allows profiling of email contacts.

Partnership Advantages

The partnership "will give SMBs an integrated, cost-effective way to execute on social selling," said Rebecca Wettemann, VP of research atNucleus Research.

"At a considerably lower price point than most other options, this makes social selling more accessible to firms with fewer resources," she told CRM Buyer.

Social selling "increases sales productivity by more than 12 percent on average," Wettemann said.

"As the number of people we work with increases, both internal and external to our organizations and across a variety of tools and channels, it becomes ever so important to provide context to the relationships and history we have with them," Constellation Research Principal Analyst Alan Lepofsky told CRM Buyer.

How Users Will Benefit

The leading CRM challenge for companies of all sizes is the loss of engagement data, Constellation's Zhou said.

Many solutions require users to input contact or associated emails, communications and other data manually, she noted. Tracking and inputting data "becomes a burden on sellers, marketers and services personnel."

The integration of contact management, as well as allowing users to see social context and other features that come with layering contact management software on top of productivity applications, "helps users or companies engage with customers more efficiently and reduces the manual data entry effort," Zhou remarked.

"Integration is key," Nucleus Research's Wettemann pointed out. People "aren't optimally selling if they spend more than 8 percent of their time on entering data into a CRM."

If you are not already familiar with Nimble, Nimble is a Social CRM that has revolutionized CRM in a number of ways …

It does the 3 Cs (contacts, calendar, and communications) right and in a way that is actually usable.

Nimble will create, and flush out social profiles, contact records for you and it will do so automatically. Or, as Nimble says …automagically.

Emails sync both ways without the need for a BCC and Google Calendar will do the same.

And much, much more.

One of the biggest innovations of Nimble has been it’s Smart Contacts App. This browser extension will allow you to take your Nimble database with you literallyanywhereon the web, including social platforms and other CRM’s, and it will also reside as a sidebar in Gmail or Outlook 365. It even works within your full Nimble web application

The Smart Contacts App performs dual functions. Highlight a person or company name and, where a record is already in Nimble, it will show you that record, allow you to edit or update it, or even add notes, tags, or tasks. I am doing thisoutsideof the actual Nimble app itself.

Where no record is found in Nimble, a live preview of what that record would look like is generated. Once again, you can edit any information and then … you canaddthat record directly into Nimble from wherever you are. Pretty awesome. Well, the Smart Contacts App just got …awesomer!

Now you will also have the ability to have Nimble search for additional information such as email addresses, addresses, and phone numbers!Nimble Prospectoris an add on premium service for the free Smart Contacts App that is included with every Nimble subscription but, it is certainly well worth the money (read on for pricing)!

Think of all of the time that you spend researching, trying to find, a contact’s phone number or email. These are two of the most important ways that you can reach out to that individual. As an added benefit, that person’s email address is a critical element that helps Nimble to identify and verify that person’s social profiles which are then used to enrich their contact record.

Once you have created contact records using the app, you can then easily group message them from within Nimble. For example, use Prospector in LinkedIn or Twitter to create records for people from the same company or from those people within a conversation. Then use group messaging to send personalized follow-up emails to each participant.

You might also be excited to read about Nimble’s free integration withCircleBackthat is also integrated into the Smart Contacts App with Prospector and is used to harvest additional contact information from that person’s email signature line. CircleBack is also used forbusiness card scanningwith Nimble’s iOS mobile app.

Nimble Prospector comes built into every Nimble Business Edition with 25 lookups per user per month. After the first 25 free monthly contact enrichment lookups, Prospector fees start at $9.95 for 50 lookups per month, $29.95 for 200 lookups per month, $59.95 for 500 lookups per month and $99.95 for 1,000 lookups per month. Additional Nimble Prospector lookups are shared across an entire Nimble team account.

What Pitney Bowes’ Partner Program And Google Android Deal Means For SMBs

Pitney Bowes hasn’t had to stray too far from its century-old beginnings as a business-to-business maker of “hand-cranked postage-stamping machines” with its latest update.

The company, which has long-since repositioned itself brand as a global technology and software company focused on business data, has rolled out Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, a “commerce enabler” that provides access to all its solutions, analytics, and APIs in a simple dashboard.

The announcement was part of a series of product highlights Pitney Bowes previewed this past week at Google’s offices to highlight its partnership with Google on its G Suite on powering Android devices to help manage contact between between businesses.

Alongside Google G Suite, Pitney Bowes also said it would use the applications associated with withGeoMarketing‘s parent Yext (more details here about our relationship), Acquisio, DocuSign, and Nimble CRM to power its new cloud-based marketing system.

The goal of the new system is to seamlessly assist clients identify customers, locate opportunities, enable communications, power shipping from anywhere to everywhere, and manage payments.

Pitney Bowes Updates Its History

And that’s where the updating of one of its oldest business and marketing functions comes in: Last week, Pitney Bowes introduced the SendPro C-Series, which updates the traditional process of choosing and adding postage to mailings.

The new SendPro system lets offices instantly compare postage prices between Federal Express, UPS, and the United Postal Service. Aimed at small businesses, SendPro helps choose ideal sending option for every parcel, letter and flat a business mails, while also providing full tracking and delivering savings across carriers.

“What’s distinctive about this feature is that 85 percent of small businesses in the U.S. use a combination of FedEx, UPS and USPS, but the rate structure is so complicated,” Mark Shearer, executive vice president and president, Pitney Bowes Global SMB Solutions, toldGeoMarketingbefore a press conference held at Google’s offices. “No normal human being can figure it out. And what all too often happens is that people spend more than they need to.”

Mailing Reinvented

Clients that use this Pitney Bowes solution can also get up to 39 percent discount from USPS just by using that device, Shearer added.

The C-Series is based on the mobile Android operating system. The new Pitney Bowes Small Business Partner Program, and will allow the companies and their clients to deliver “a broad range of new web and android applications directly and rapidly to the device.”

“Creating this partner ecosystem gives our more than one million small and medium businesses and e-commerce clients the opportunity to use a broad range of cloud and mobile enabled business applications to better reach their clients, manage their operations more effectively and ultimately grow their businesses,” Shearer added. “Our digital platform creates an entirely new client experience and offers the flexibility to quickly add more partner applications and bring even greater value to our small business client base in the near future.”

Clients should view shipping and mailing are the “anchor tenant apps” of the new cloud marketing system, Shearer said. But the most exciting thing is what will come from innovation from companies like Google, Yext, and from small developer shops around the world.

Pitney Bowes is also hosting a hack-a-thon to promote its platform with the grand prize being a job working on our development organization.

“We’re trying to have fun with it,” Shearer said. “My background is IBM hardware and systems. What I found is every time we introduce an open platform, no matter what you have in mind, the industry will run with it in an unanticipated direction. So today’s announcement is really about trying to encourage innovation on top of the small business platform.”

Pitney Bowes clients will get an Android tablet to manage their accounts and partner apps on the SendPro system.

“It’s the Android application ecosystem that we’re trying to inspire,” Shearer added. “As an application platform, it’s just ubiquitous. It also has some really interesting impacts. With the old postage meter, every office had ‘Joe’ to manage it. Joe was the only one that could figure out how to use the postage meter. With this new device, anyone can manage their postage and track orders without having to ask someone else for help.”

In keeping with the way Pitney Bowes hasevolved its focus on location data over the past two years to meet what it calls “the era of cognition,” the company will also be working with Yext to help manage location information. Earlier this year, Pitney Bowes createda new data unit that promised to make the seemingly infinite amounts of customer insights more manageable.

“We do have a lot of location intelligence assets and I do envision SaaS based applications that help our client’s target their market and better understand how to market to their current client base,” Shearer said. “We are using a lot of these technologies in our own relationships with clients. Now that the new devices are all cloud-based, we’re measuring everything. If clients are having a hard time with certain features, or are not fully exploiting the value, we’ll digitally cultivate their awareness of these features and help them use it.”

How to Grow Your Business without Spending a Dime on Marketing with Jon Ferrara

Jon is a CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. It is the first CRM that works for you by building and updating contact data for you, then works with you, everywhere you work.Listen to the full podcast with Jon here: https://www.eofire.com/podcast/jonferrara/

Microsoft's recent decision to motivate its value-added partners to sell third-party solutions has created several openings for small businesses to gain big revenue advantages.

One startup in the CRM space,Nimble, saw an opportunity with this dynamic and recently closed a global Microsoft contract. When I learned about Nimble's win, I wanted to learn how a small startup closed such a giant deal with a giant company. Since I have worked with Nimble's CEO Jon Ferrara, I decided to reach out to him directly to uncover how he did it.

Here are some of the most insightful and actionable highlights from our interview (you can watch the entire video interviewhere):

What are the strategy and tactics to landing a big deal with a big company?

Ferrara used social media to build direct relationships with Microsoft's Office and Outlook product managers as well as its business team members who were making decisions on channel and distribution of third-party products.

The top performing tactic was to acquire a list of Twitter influencers who attended Microsoft's prior year's World Partner Conference (WPC). Ferrara then segmented the influencers into 200 key contacts for further follow-up. According to Ferrara, he used his own solution to automatically populate email addresses, social profiles and contact information which shaved days off of the typical research effort. From there, he segmented the list, wrote an email with authentic and relevant messaging inviting them to call or email him.

The results surprised him. The outreach emails generated a 50 percent open rate and 25 meetings.

Because of the interest generated across multiple Microsoft departments, Ferrara was able to negotiate a global deal to resell Nimble directly and through its partner channel as the de facto sales andmarketingadd-on for Office 365, Outlook and Outlook Mobile. Additionally, Microsoft agreed to make Nimble its teacher of social sales and marketing for its partner channel.

How did you convince Microsoft to deal on such a grand scale?

For Microsoft resellers to be successful, they need to start selling front and back office solutions on top of the "plumbing" that they're selling.

"This is precisely what we positioned Nimble to be," Ferrara told me. "We explained that Nimble is the first thing that brands will need after adopting Office 365. Because our simple social sales and marketing system is what enables Office to become increasingly 'sticky' and drive adoption of its Azure cloud services."

What advice would you give to small organizations about creating the trust that would allow them to land their own massive deal?

"The single biggest way for a brand to earn the type of intimacy and trust that enables them to score such a major contract is to go into every meeting extremely prepared, Ferrara told me. "It is vital to understand who you are speaking with and what their business is all about. Additionally, keep your questions simple and then shut up, listen and learn."

Ferrara explained that when you do this, that individual is going to share everything you need to know and everything you need to do to earn his or her trust so that an intimate partnership can be formed.

Ferrara continues, "If you sit there and simply propose ways that you can help them solve their issues, it's not going to go in your favor because that's what every salesman off the street is going to try and do."

Ferrara positioned his company as the primary thought leader in the field. He used his own solution to network at scale, showing Microsoft exactly what the platform can do first hand. Then after securing the meetings and phone calls with Microsoft executives, he came prepared to learn about what the company needed.

Jon Ferrara of Nimble: Social as a Word is Going Away — And We’re Just Going to Get Back to Doing Business

It’s hard for me to believe, but this conversation marks the seventh anniversary of this series. And there’s nobody more surprised than I am that this has gone on so long, as I thought I’d do this for a couple of weeks at the most. But the conversations with so many interesting, influential people have made these seven years fly by, and honestly, I never once thought about moving on from having these weekly interviews.

So, to mark the occasion I was really glad thatJon Ferrara, founder ofNimble(and before that GoldMine), was able to join me for this week’s conversation. Because it was Jon who was my very first guest in this series those seven years ago.

A Look at the Evolution of CRM, and Its Future

We cover a lot of ground as we reminisce about the past, dig into what’s changed over the past seven years in the CRM space, and eventually look at what is coming down the pike. So this is a bit longer than usual. But hey, it’s not every day you hit a pretty cool milestone like this!

Below is an edited transcript of our conversation. To hear the full interview click on the embedded SoundCloud player below. And thanks to all who have read/listened to the series the past seven years. And a BIG THANK YOU to Anita Campbell and the whole Small Business Trends team for giving me a platform for having these kinds of conversations over the years.

* * * * *

Small Business Trends: I recently realized that come September 3rd, I will have been doing this series for seven years, which is just mind blowing to me. This whole thing started out with a conversation I had with John Ferrara. As luck would have it, guess who’s back with me to celebrate the 7-year anniversary? Jon Ferrara.

Jon, thank you for joining me today, man.

Jon Ferrara:Brent, I am super excited to be here with you today. I cherish you as a friend.

Small Business Trends: At the time, back in 2010, you had already sold GoldMine. You had taken some time off and had just recently started this new thing that was called Nimble. Now seven years into Nimble, tell us a little bit about what it was and what it is.

Jon Ferrara:You bet. So it’s my feeling that after using social media back in 2008, ’09, and ’10 it was going to change the way we work, play, the way people buy, and the way we need to sell to them. I started looking at contact tools and CRMs and saw they weren’t social. Then I started looking at contact management and saw it was broken because email, contact, and calendar are three separate applications and that CRM isn’t about relationships. It’s about reporting. So I build Nimble to reimagine a CRM as a social relationship manager that layers on top of your email, contact, and calendar. Build the CRM for you, and it’s been an amazing journey because I think the market has woken up to the vision that I had about social CRM and social selling and now I think it’s become ubiquitous that we need to change the way we sell, because customers have changed the way they buy.

Small Business Trends: Here we are in 2017. You’ve seen a lot in terms of not just how customer relationship management has evolved over time, but also how businesses in general ( startups and small businesses) have begun their journeys over that two and a half decade period. Tell me, what’s the biggest surprising change that you’ve seen in relationship building today as compared to when you first got started with GoldMine?

Jon Ferrara:You know, the biggest thing I’m surprised about Brent is that nothing’s changed. I think today people are still, for the most part, doing business the old fashioned way. They’re sending out a quarterly newsletter and expecting people to come knocking on their door. They’re still doing business in the old way of giving a sales rep a CRM and telling them to go get ‘em, and not really helping that sales rep with engagement as opposed to using the CRM for reporting. I think that social is changing the way that we work, play, buy, and sell, and I think that just now today, the market is waking up to that fact and they’re looking for something different.

But I think that the biggest surprise I have is that the thing I fixed with GoldMine … I’m not even going to count how many years ago it was. Hang on. Dang. It’s 27 years ago when I founded GoldMine! GoldMine was the first program that integrated email, contact, and calendar into a team relationship manager with sales and market automation. Today, contact management is broken again and it needs a GoldMine, but more importantly, a social cloud-based GoldMine.

This is what I mean. Today your operating system of your business is the contacts you’re connected to, the conversations you’re having, and activities you’re driving. That’s email, contact, and calendar. Today you have two choices. You’re going to either do that in Office 365 or Gmail/G Suite. And both of those applications, all three of those components are three separate apps and every team member has a separate contact database, which means there is no system or record of relationship for your business, which means that everybody in your company can’t be on one [accord] with your contacts, let alone the history of interactions on email and calendar. And most importantly on social as well.

That’s what Nimble fixes today. The biggest thing is this, if you have to go to your CRM or your contact program to use it, you won’t do it. That’s the biggest cause of failure of CRM, is lack of use. The second one’s bad data, because even if you beat on your sales people to type stuff in the CRM, it’s going to decay so rapidly that it’ll become unusable and so I think that the fact that they call it Salesforce because you have to force sales people to use it, is a testimony to the fact that you work for their CRM. It doesn’t work for you. You have to go to it to work for it. It should work for you by building itself and then work with you wherever you are. You should be in the river with your customer, adding value on a daily basis to set yourself up as a trusted advisor so when they make a buying decision, they know they pick up the phone they call you, but they drag their friends with them.

Small Business Trends: Wow. You’re still talking about the Social River, man. I remember hearing that back in 2010.

Jon Ferrara:I am, but I’m going to tell you something about social, Brent. Social as a word is going to go away, and we’re just going to get back to doing business. Because if you think about it, the term Social CRM has already passed over the horizon and there will go social selling, because ultimately it’s just about CRM and selling. But social’s just a new way of having conversation.

Do you remember when the Internet first came out? Everybody talked about “I this” and” E that”… eToys and iContact. Everybody thought the Internet was going to change everything. And you know what? It did. But you don’t talk about the Internet anymore, because it’s just the plumbing and when you turn your faucet on on your sink, you don’t think about the re-circulation pipes. You just worry about there being hot or cold water.

And so yes, I am still talking about the social river, but we don’t need to talk about social selling or social CRM. We just need to talk about contact management and basic relationship management that still is lacking in the main tools we run our businesses on.

The cool thing is, Nimble now synchronizes with all of your existing business apps, becomes that unified system where I can work back within them, even if you already have a CRM. And so we will launch in 30 days a plugin to Dynamics CRM, that helps any CRM user engage more effectively and bring their Office contacts with them and then take their Office and their Dynamics contacts anywhere as they’re working, because your sales people should be out there in the field with the customers having conversations, not inside a database.

Small Business Trends: With the move to the cloud that CRM applications and their complementary applications have made, how do you look at CRM cloud applications meeting the expectations and needs of the modern business? From a scale of 1 to 10, how well are they doing that today?

Jon Ferrara:Let’s talk about the sales and marketing and social technology tech stack that a business needs in order to manage the customer lifecycle. So, if you’re a business, number one, you get a domain. You go to GoDaddy. Get a domain. Then what you do is you need to get a website. So you get WordPress or something. Then what you need to do is you need email, contact, and calendar. So you buy Office or Gmail or G Suite. The next thing you’re going to need is some place to take the eyeballs you’re driving to the website. So I call that MailChimp to Marketo, right? It’s marketing. So you need to capture a lead, whatever you got, email, name, phone number, whatever you get. Put in to a database, and then nurture that lead till it’s lead qualified. Once it’s lead qualified, whatever that means to the business, you then put it in the CRM and you tell all your sales reps to go get them. So now we got two applications at a minimum, marketing automation and CRM.

So the sales rep sitting there with this lead and the database, and they don’t know anything about that lead, so what do they do? They Google them. They look them up. That’s 60 percent time wasted, looking things up and logging what you know and then logging what you did in email, calendar, and social, and the CRM, and you have to go to it to do it. So instead of doing that, what you do is you buy sales intelligence software. So the sales intelligence software maybe enriches the CRM record with who that person is and what their business is about. Maybe that’s inside view, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Nimble, which happens to be number one in that category in sales intelligence. Once you have the intelligence, you need to engage. And so you think about market automation as the high level bombers of the battlefield bombing the leads with nurturing.

Once you get that done, you need to put boots on the ground. That’s sales people. Sales people need intelligence. That’s sales intelligence, and they need a rifle. The rifle is not market automation. Sales people don’t use Marketo. Sales people use some sort of hand to hand combat tool, which is email templates with tracking. So that’s Yesware, Tab app, whatever email tracking templating software. So at a minimum you got four components. You got market automation, CRM, sales intelligence, and sales enablement. Each of those tools costs $50 to $150 per rep per month, and you give all that to a sales rep, they’re not even going to be able to use it because it’s too complex. So you got to hire a sales administrator for $50,000 to $100,000 a year to run it.

Now, if you asked me how the CRM was doing regarding serving the needs of the customer, I’m going to say you’ve got to buy too many products and too many tools today. I believe you need a blend of social sales and marketing with a blend of marketing CRM, sales intelligence, and sales enablement. Then the thing needs to work with you wherever you work, and I think that’s why we continue to innovate in ways that are unique in the market, because we see that need of too much complexity, too much cost, and too many tools, and that for 99 percent of the businesses out there, they’re not going to go buy Marketo and Salesforce and InsideView and Yesware, or some other email template program. It’s too much. That’s where we’re at with Nimble, providing that blend of social and sales and marketing to manage the customer lifecycle across an entire organization.

Small Business Trends: All right, so let’s talk about a couple of things that weren’t even a blip on this screen back when we first talked seven years ago and their importance. From a customer engagement perspective, being able to scale efficiently your ability to respond, or to provide a quick answer that could help convert. We hear a lot of talk about chat bots. Talk a little bit about what you feel the importance of chat bots are today to modern customer engagement strategy.

Jon Ferrara:I think if you are not providing a means for your customer to communicate on whatever channel, at whatever time, at whatever moment your customer wants to, you’re going to lose them. Because it’s the people that are doing that today that are going to win that heart and mind. Because let’s face it, you’re out there in the cloud, you’re in-app trying to evaluate some program. You might be doing it on the weekend, you might be doing it in the middle of the night, and you might be doing it wherever, and you want some help. And so chat bots — and I’m not just talking about a chat bot on a website — I’m talking about chat bots within the applications themselves as well, so that your customer can ask a question at any point, at any time, and be able to get an answer. And it’s not just a sales answer, it’s really a customer success answer.

I think that sales has become a four letter word and that service is the new sales, and that you should be empowering you customer base and business team members to be rewarded and focused on customer success. That comes through communication and listening and dialogue. And so yes, I think chat bots are amazing, and that’s why we incorporate them, not just on our own website, but inside our apps as well.

Small Business Trends: All right. Let’s talk about the AI, because chat bots and AI have got to go together.

Jon Ferrara:Yeah.

Small Business Trends: How important is AI? We hear a lot of talk about it. We’re seeing a lot of people say that they have it and they’re doing it. (A) Is it important? and (B) Are you actually seeing it being done?

Jon Ferrara:You know Brent, when we start talking about AI I start saying the more digital we get the more human we need to be. And that yes, you can use computers to discern information across disparate databases to tell you things you don’t know. And that these bots might be able to do some basic conversation, but in the end, you need humans involved through that process. But I’ll tell you what, my first introduction to computers was in the Pan Am building in New York City. It was a teletype that was running ELIZA. ELIZA was a list based AI system that you … It said, “Hey, Brent, how are you?” You’d say, “I’m doing good.” And it says, “Oh, great. You know it sounds like your day is going good. Tell me more.” You tell it more and it interacts with you. It was pretty good back in the day and it’s gotten better, but I don’t really know if there’s truly a program that’s doing AI today as opposed to just some inherent word parsing and suggestions at this point. I don’t think we’re there yet.

We’ll get there, but in the meantime, I think that no matter how much AI you put into it, I think the key thing for business success is to be able to deliver context and insights on the relationships that you’re engaging with, whatever you’re engaging about.

Nimble Disrupting CRM World with Microsoft Edge plug-in

Contact management specialist Nimble has strengthened its presence in the CRM market with the release of its Smart Contacts App with support for Microsoft Edge, the web browser developed as the successor to Internet Explorer.

The new plug-in, offered free for the standard edition, makes available the social marketing and business functionality of the contact management app directly within the Edge browser. The add-in version is available for all users of Office 365, Outlook desktop for Windows and Mac and Outlook iOS. Nimble also offers plug-ins for the Chrome, Safari, and Firefox browsers.

A business edition, which provides access for team social sales and marketing functionalities, will be offered at $25 per user per month, and will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.

Jon Ferrara, CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Nimble, believes the plug-in could become a significant market disruptor by replacing market-dominating enterprise CRMs such as Salesforce as a tool for sales staff. He claims that most industry-leading products are better suited to executive-level managers and department heads than salespeople who spend their days communicating via e-mail and customer-facing social networks.

Ferrara argues that contact management should be at the core of CRM products designed for use by ordinary employees rather than managers. Instead, he says, they are really designed as reporting tools.

The Nimble app is intended to enable salespeople to call on their contact list on the go by synchronizing individual e-mails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship management system that can be accessed directly in the browser by users of Office 365 and Outlook.

Nimble’s features include social profile matching and enrichment, matching social profiles for contacts and companies and automatically incorporating additional business and social details; instant business insights on people and companies by automatically building live profiles; and identification of top prospects for follow-up.

How Nimble Makes You More Agile

Jon Ferraraco-founded the pre-Facebook, pre-Internet, pre-LinkedInCRMsystem calledGoldMine. His motivation was to connect people at a more personal level—to let them build relationships that build real value. That’s still his mission at his newer company,Nimble. Their product is what many call the “world’s first social CRM.” More than a CRM, Nimble helps companies connect the tools, silos, and customer experiences that many find difficult.Its value goes way beyond CRM. It helps companies operate with greater agility.

Jon is a big customer experience fan and recently he and I had the opportunity to chat in depth about how technology can help (or hurt) the customer experience.

Our world has changed. Customers no longer want to be pushed through a sales funnel (like many CRM programs can lead them to feel). They’re humans and they value relationships, value creation, and good timing.

So I asked Jon about his views on these points.His ideas around deepening relationships by blending CRM into social conversations are worth your attention.

For those of you who haven’t seen Nimble yet, here’s a screen shot (for Atlanta-based Tope Awotona, founder ofwww.calendly.com, whom I don’t know yet) showing how robust Nimble’s information curation capabilities are and some of the options it gives you to connect, comment, follow, annotate, save, remind, etc.:

Storyminers: So, besides helping sales people keep track of their selling efforts, how can CRM be used tocreate more valuefor customers?

Nimble:Customer Experience is all about aligning the promises you make with the experiences you deliver. Unfortunately, your customer journey is broken whenever your customer-facing employees use disparate systems. The CRM system is commonly used by salespeople and marketers for outreach to prospects, customers and influencers; front-line CX representatives and customer care teams work within their CX system; and accounting and everyone else in the office works in G-Suite or in Office 365.

What’s missing in most cases is a unified system on a single platform that unifies the six islands of information that surround every business: sales, marketing, customer care, accounting, social media and email. Granted, there are enterprise options available from Salesforce and Oracle which unify your engagements, but their complex, costly systems are not accessible to 99% of the business world.

What most businesses need is a simply smart, social CRM that generates people and company records automatically from the data that’s already in and around your business so every customer-facing employee can engage armed with business context and social insights. This is what Nimble does, and it’s why we’re growing so quickly.

My take:That’s smart design.Once all of a company’s systems are connected, understanding customer intent and anticipating needs lets you deliver higher value service at lower cost. Until those connections are in place, products like Nimble can help you connect the dots, working around the common disconnects that lead to frustrated customers.

Storyminers: How can companies leverage CRM to serve before they sell? (i.e. emphasize creating value rather than just extracting it from clients’ wallets)

Nimble:Imagine this scenario. I am a sales rep and I’m on Twitter, in Outlook or in Gmail, on Instagram, Facebook, and the company’s CRM. When I’m reading a post on StoryMiners, I want to know who Mike Wittenstein is and whether I’ve ever spoken to or connected with him in the past.I want to know if anybody on my team knows him.I want to walk in his digital footprint to get to know him and what he’s passionate about, and I want to be able to connect within him on whatever appropriate, relevant and authentic channel I can. That’s what Nimble helps people do, by surfacing a customer’s history of interactions with a person or business and displaying the important signals that can help facilitate a genuine connection.

Nimble makes it easy for people to engage authentically with a customer, prospect or lead about what he or she is passionate about, before engaging with them about business.

My take: Puttingrelationships and service ahead of salesis the difference between a valued experience and a merely functional transaction. As long as you use the information you find out about someone using Nimble to make an honest connection that doesn’t manipulate others, it’s helpful to everyone and contributes to value creation.

Storyminers: What are some of the most common CRM challenges a business needs to overcome in order to be much more responsive to consumers “whenever they want it, whereever they want it, and however they want it?”

Nimble:The biggest mistake companies make when implementing their CRM is asking employees to become data entry jockeys. Most customer-facing employees continue to manage most conversations and relationships via email, spreadsheets and in social media — and not in a separate contact manager (which requires laborious documentation). CRMs that require users to log what they did, whom they did it with, and what the possible outcomes could be every time they connect with external constituents are fundamentally flawed. They require a mountain of work that people simply aren’t willing to do.

There is a powerful stat released byDocuratedstating: ‘Only a third of sales reps’ time is actually spent selling. That means the other two thirds is wasted on day-to-day stuff like researching contact details and updating the CRM. With the right technologies and processes, you can easily cut this noise in half.

My take: The more time you give salespeople to sell, the more they’ll sell?From my personal yet still limited experience with the product, I love the way Nimble seems tocapture what’s current and relevant, then lets you do the ‘next right thing.’

Storyminers: How does Nimble overcome these challenges and fundamentally change the way CX teams engage with consumers?

Nimble:Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager that auto-generates dynamic social and business profiles for O365, Outlook and Gmail users everywhere people work.

Nimble delivers these social business insights within your work window so you can engage authentically on whatever channel your customers or prospects are using. Multi-channel support spans the Web (via Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge plug-ins); in popular Web applications (Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365 and Skype) and in email, calendar and contacts, in the cloud with Office 365 or Gmail, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and soon on Android).

Using Nimble, customer-facing employees can engage authentically throughout the journey, from the time a contact is first identified to the time she becomes a repeat customer.

My take: knowing not only what you’ve done with someone online, butseeing what others on your team are doing with a company or contact is a brilliant feature. This way, one brand, regardless of how many people are in it, can act like and appear as one brand to customers. The left arm can finally know what the right arm is doing?

Storyminers: How much life does CRM have before it gets eclipsed with more multi-purpose and context-sensitive technologies (like Nimble)?

Nimble:In today’s over-connected, over-communicated world, it’s more important than ever to engage authentically. If you’re not listening and engaging with customers, prospects and influencers about their passions, you’re already dead.

Relationships may start on Twitter, where you can find areas of commonality, then switch over to LinkedIn, before moving to email, and ultimately to the calendar for an appointment or video call. If you’re doing it right, your relationship grows deeper, and you connect on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat as well.

Through these fluid connections, prospects and customers get to know you — not just your business persona — which is key, because the customer journey is largely driven by emotional connections. That transcends business and moves into the what I call “the Five Fs”: Family. Friends, Food, Fun, and Frolicking. This is where relationships really solidify. The only way to maintain a real relationship with someone today is to stay top-of-mind, and you can’t do that with a monthly newsletter. You do that by adding value to their journey to become their trusted advisor. They will not only pick up the phone, they will bring their friends with them.

My take:Nimble is perfecting the bridge between professional and personal. We’re all humans. Finding the right human-to-human connection within a business context is something we all can all use to move our businesses forward.

Storyminers: How do you see customer experience evolving over the next 10 years with AI, chatbots and new high-tech devices?

Nimble:I believe a social CRM that builds itself and delivers social business insights everywhere you work is key to making and managing authentic connections online. Siri may be in the offing, but it’s years away. As processes and systems become increasingly digitized and AI becomes more prominent, we’re focused on helping people be more human, authentic, and engaging when making connections online.

My take: The Kool-Aid®tastes goodandI’d like to see Nimble become anearly adopter of machine learning capabilitiesso that the way I like to work becomes ever more natural.

In Summary

Nimble is a product born from an intense focus on creating valueforothers. By design, it enhances relationships and brings authenticity to the forefront. My first experience with the product has been comfortable and natural. Knowing more about a person at the start does help you connect in more meaningful ways! Knowing when your important contacts are active on a topic that dovetails with your own interests is magically helpful. If your organization does have all its dots connected when it comes to communications, Nimble is sure to improve the customer experience!

In this episode of CRM Rocks, Markus Erlandsson talks to Jon Ferrara from Nimble about making CRM for the users, the discussion starts with how CRMs started and how to get usability and usage. Jon continues to discuss how to sell and where to start with your selling.

Jon Ferrara is a serial CRM and Relationship Management entrepreneur and noted speaker about Social Media’s effects on Sales and Marketing. His most recent venture Nimble.com, has re-imagined CRM by building a Simply Smarter Social Sales and Marketing platform. Jon is best known as the co-founder of GoldMine Software Corp, one of the early pioneers in the Sales Force Automation (SFA) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software categories for Small to Medium sized Businesses (SMBs).

Nimble today launched its Smart Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Edge, bringing Nimble’s social business insights capabilities to Microsoft Edge and enabling users to make and manage connections from within the browser.

“It’s getting harder and harder to remember who it is you’ve spoken to, or to do the research necessary to understand who somebody is and what their business is about whenever you’re engaging with them,” says Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. “If you have to Google somebody before a meeting or go to your contacts or your CRM to look [that person] up, you won’t do it. That’s what Nimble solves, [and] this plug-in for Edge gives you all the contact and company information you need to be effective at engagement wherever you engage.”

Nimble offers four key features under the umbrella of social business insights: (1) social profile matching and enrichment, which matches social profiles for contacts and companies and automatically enriches them with additional business and social details; (2) business insights on people and companies, delivering instant insights on people and companies by automatically building live profiles with details such as who they are, where they were, where they’re from, number of company employees, year founded, revenue, industry, CEO, location, social profiles, and contact info; (3) prospect segmenting, enabling users to identify the best prospects to tag for follow-up or engage with actions such as group email messages; and (4) social prospecting, which provides contexts and insights designed to promote smarter prospecting.

Nimble’s Edge plug-in enables users to unify their contacts with their communications and activities across platforms, including social media, Ferrara says.

“Today, you have your email, your contacts, and your calendar in either Office 365, Gmail G Suite, iCloud, or all of the above. So how do you manage your contacts when contact management is broken, because in all those platforms, email, contacts, and calendar are separate,” he says. “The plug-in for Edge helps you to use that wherever you’re engaging, so if you’re in your email inbox, if you’re in Twitter or LinkedIn, if you’re in aForbesarticle, all you have to do is Nimble them: You turn the Nimble plug-in on in Edge, and it knows that you looking at, [for example], Jon Ferrara’s Twitter account, or his LinkedIn, or, if you hover on the name in a Forbes article, it will automatically build a record for that person.”

Nimble offers plug-ins for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, in addition to Edge.

Nimble dug a little deeper into the customer relationship management (CRM) space with the release of its Smart Contacts App with support for Microsoft Edge.

Edge is the web browser developed by Microsoft and included in Windows 10, Windows 10 Mobile and Xbox One. Edge replaces Internet Explorer as the default web browser on all kinds of devices.

The new plug-in is free for the standard edition and brings all the social marketing and business offerings of the Nimble contact management app directly into the Edge browser.

Designed For Sales People

Normally, the release of a plug-in would pass as something of interest, but not necessarily noteworthy.

However, this plug-in deserves a little bit more attention because it could conceivably replace big enterprise CRMs like Salesforce for sales people, for example, and also in light of the rapid growth Santa Monica, Calif.-based Nimble, a relative newcomer in the established CRM space, has made in short time.

Indeed, Nimble CEO and founder Jon Ferrara is pitching the Nimble Contact Management app as a disruptor in a space that is dominated by big enterprise-wide CRMs.

These big, enterprise CRMs, Ferrara told CMSWire, are more appropriate for C-Suite executives and department heads, than sales people who spend the days in email inboxes and customer-facing social networks.

“What is missing from most CRMs is relationship management — even though they are called CRM. CRM for these big apps really stands for Customer Reporting because they are really designed as reporting tools,” Ferrara said.

“Contact management, however, should be at the core of CRM but it is not. The big apps and platforms like Salesforce were designed for management and not for workers.”

Nimble Contact Management

The idea behind the Nimble app is a simple one. According to Ferrara, it brings workers’ contacts list with them wherever they go.

Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles everywhere they work.

The result is workers using Office 365 and Outlook will be able to manage their contacts directly in the browser.

“My argument is that contact management is broken in G Suite and Office and the others because email, contact management and calendar are three separate tasks. In most cases to acess these tools you have to jump in and out of different apps which is not great for working,” he said.

“You need to be able to access these tools where ever you work, including inside your browser.”

Nimble’s Future

Ferrara founded Nimble in 2009 to give small-to-medium businesses the advantages of customer relationship management (CRM) that large enterprises enjoy, without the expense.

It’s not his first foray into CRM. He previously co-founded GoldMine, one of the earliest CRM software companies, in 1989.

Nimble comes in two versions today: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user per month. The Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in is available to all Microsoft Edge, Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac and Outlook iOS users.

The business edition offers access team social sales and marketing functionalities and will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.

While it is too soon to talk about the Dynamics and Nimble tie-in, Ferrara sees Nimble as the gateway app to Dynamics as organizations move to the cloud and start looking for CRM or enterprise resource planning. Dynamics will not be the end of the story either:

“I want to arrive at a point where organizations that buy Office will buy Nimble too. Every team needs a contact management, and they need simply social sales. I want Nimble to become the relationship system of record for the entire company not just the sales team.”

About the Author

David is a full-time journalist based in Paris, who spends his time working between Ireland, the UK and France. A partisan of ‘green’ living and conservation, he is particularly interested in information management and how enterprise content management, analytics, big data and cloud computing impact on it.

Microsoft’s Edge browser has a bit of a chicken and egg conundrum going for it as it’s relatively new presence on a relatively new OS hinders it from being a trusted name among internet browsers. Coupled with the fact that it’s predecessor in Internet Explorer has become the butt of many internet meme jokes (for mostly justified reasons) and its largest competitor continues to build enticing lock-in features, Edge has its work cut out for itself.

Nimble is the first Social Sales and Marketing CRM that works for you by building your CRM from your existing Office 365 data and then works with you, everywhere you engage. We’ve optimized Nimble to work seamlessly inside Office 365, Outlook, Skype and even Dynamics CRM. We help you easily deploy your CRM by syncing your team’s Office 365 contacts, emails, and calendars into a unified relationship manager enriched with the business insights you need to engage.

Nimble is a fairly comprehensive addition to Edge that pulls and displays a complete communication trail which includes shared emails, notes, and social media messages right from within the browser. Gone are the days of whack-a-mole-like professional communication tracking, thanks to Nimble’s ability to aggregate company CRM listings.

Furthermore, Nimble works outside of the confines of Outlook, Skype or Dynamics as it provides contact insights when surfing social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, AngelList, Twitter, CrunchBase and of course LinkedIn, to name a few. With Nimble, users can pull up relevant contact info while engaging with people on their favorite sites.

Nimble also works for people on the go as it integrates with Outlook mobile to provide a similar communications flow as its desktop counterpart.

To try out Nimble and all of its version 4.0 features, Edge users canhead over to www.nimble.comfor a 14-day free trial, after which, the price becomes $25 per license, per month. Understandably, it’s the business CRM listings that help make Nimble the successful communications tool it is now, but hopefully, developers will see the benefits in a more consumer oriented version of the service in the future.

Nimble Launches Smart Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Edge

Nimble, the award-winning pioneer of Social Sales and Marketing CRM, announced the launch of Nimble Smart Contacts Add-In for Microsoft Edge. The new add-in delivers social business insights on people and businesses within Microsoft’s Web browser, thusly enabling Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook users to make and manage authentic connections far more easily everywhere they work.

Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars, and contacts as well as social networks into a shared team relationship manager, enriched with rich social and business profiles for Office 365 and Outlook users everywhere they work. Multi-channel support spans the web (via Edge, Chrome, Safari and Firefox plug-ins); and popular web applications (Microsoft Teams, Dynamics 365, and Skype) in addition to email, calendar and contacts, in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and soon on Android).

“Microsoft Office 365 customers need a simple contact management platform to add on top of Office 365 and Outlook to provide them what’s missing, a simple smart social sales and marketing relationship manager,” said Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. “We founded Nimble to deliver what people loved about GoldMine, great team contact management that sales people love to use blended with social sales and marketing that automatically builds your CRM from your Office 365 data and then works with you inside of Microsoft Edge everywhere you work.”

“Until we found Nimble, our employees primarily managed contacts in their personal email and social media accounts,” explained Mark Fidelman, Managing Director of Fanatics Media. “Our legacy CRM system failed to deliver the business context we needed because employees didn’t have time to log each interaction with every constituent in an isolated CRM system and it was time-consuming to research someone’s digital footprint. With Nimble, we vastly improved our ability to build authentic relationships across the customer journey with dynamic, contextual information in Microsoft Edge and everywhere we work online.”

Pricing and Availability

Nimble is available for a free 14 day trial and offers a Business edition at $25 per user, per month. The Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in extension is available to all Microsoft Edge, Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac, and Outlook iOS users. The Nimble Add-in will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users within the next few months.

Microsoft wasn't the only companymaking announcementsduring its Inspire partner conference last week.

Its partners got into the action as well, announcing a number of releases and additions forMicrosoftproducts.

Of these,Nimble’s new add-in for Office 365 and Outlook stands out. While add-ins generally slip under the radar, Nimble Smart Contacts App is the latest in an ongoing strategy by Nimble to make itself an integral part of Microsoft's continued push of Azure in the enterprise.

The Nimble Smart Contacts App freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS delivers business insights on people and companies.

The app doesn't aim to replace the face-to-face contact that drives any relationship, including sales relationships, according to Jon Ferrera, CEO of Nimble. Instead, the app aims to make it easier for people to connect, taking the cold out of cold-calling.

Putting Contacts in Context in the Inbox

Ferrara founded the Santa Monica, Calif.-based Nimble in 2009 to give small-to-medium businesses the advantages of customer relationship management (CRM) that large enterprises enjoy, without the expense.

Nimble is not Ferrara's first foray into CRM. He previously co-foundedGoldMine, one of the earliest CRM software companies in 1989. The company later sold for a reported $125 million in 1999.

Nimble pulls together CRM, unified communications and conversations, social media tools and team collaboration in the same application.

The tool aims to create deeper context around your contacts and meetings within the email inbox.

The thinking here is smart. Because despite the rise of social media and networks, workers still spend many hours of their days in their inboxes. While the inbox provides a direct communication channel with contacts, it rarely provides information about them.

The new add-in combines calendars and contacts in the same place so that for every customer, partner or personal email exchange you have, the add-in will provide a wider context for that exchange.

In short, it surfaces social business details about your contacts and companies to help you engage in an effective and informed manner.

“What’s missing is connectivity between Outlook and the calendars and contacts that workers are using now. You don’t get any information from your calendar and social to that you can use,” Ferrera said.

“Nimble solves that by unifying your Gmail with G Suites, or iCloud or Office 365 with your calendar and contact list. It synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles available to users everywhere they work.”

The Coming 'Enterprise Cloud Turf War'

In a wider context, Ferrera noted Microsoft iterates, rather than innovates. It waits for other companies to build the market before moving in with its massive sales and marketing machine to dominate it, he said.

Nimble’s role here, he said, would be to introduce SMBs to the Microsoft products available through the Azure cloud.

“The next enterprise cloud turf war will be decided flat out by ISVs and enterprise developers and where they decide to build applications. So far, AWS is winning with ISV, Azure with enterprises, but that could change,” he said.

Nimble comes in two versions: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user, per month. The new Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in is available for Office 365, Outlook desktop on Windows and Mac and Outlook.

In its beginning, social was cutting edge. People thought it was THE way to communicate and would revolutionized the world. Social has certainly changed engagement and communication, the way customers make buying decisions, and the ways companies engage. Today, if your business is not engaging with social media, it’s game over.

Unfortunately, businesses are struggling to manage relationships in today’s over-connected world. Sending an introductory email to a potential client who just spent 3 hours with your CEO is embarrassing at best. The whole company needs to be on one page regarding all interactions with business constituents.

To understand social communication challenges and overcoming them, I recently connected with social business thought leader and Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara. Jon argues that a lightweight social CRM that delivers social business insights everywhere you work is key to making and managing authentic connections. Siri, he said, may be in the offing, but it’s years away. As processes and systems become increasingly digitized and AI becomes more prominent, Jon is focused on helping people be more human, authentic, and engaging when making connections online.

What is your history with CRMs, and why did you decide to create Nimble?

I created and co-founded the award-winning CRM, GoldMine, in 1989 with the aim to help people in fast-growing small- and medium-sized businesses connect, share and collaborate across business functions. This was long before Outlook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Hootsuite, Hubspot, and similar contact, CRM and social business tools existed. Over the next decade, we partnered with Microsoft and its massive network to help grow the company into a multi-million dollar enterprise, which I sold in 1999 for $125 million. I then put CRMs in my rear view and moved on to other ventures.

During my absence, most CRM vendors moved upstream to focus on the enterprise, leaving many SMBs under served - unless they were willing to spend hundreds of dollars per user on elaborate systems.

The realization that roughly 1% of the 225 million businesses worldwide actually use a CRM system – led me to recognize a fatal flaw in the industry: today’s CRM products are fundamentally broken. Most people’s CRM today is their email inbox, spreadsheets and now social media.

As people face information overload, we continue to manage most of their conversations and relationships via email and social media — and not in a contact manager that requires laborious documentation.

I founded Nimble to resolve this dissonance by becoming the world’s simple, smart and social contact manager for individuals and teams.

What does Nimble do and why is it necessary?

People claim that CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management.” I disagree as today’s CRMs are used to track what a salesperson or marketer did, whom they did it with, and what the possible outcomes could be; not to manage relationships. Today’s CRM’s are more Customer Reporting Managers.

Real relationships are formed where people connect and communicate; today, this happens via email, on social media, and through similar channels; places that CRMs are largely unaware of. With so many interactions, it’s impossible to retain a relational history with most clients and prospects.

Nimble is the first CRM that builds itself by connecting the features of Office 365, Outlook, Gsuite or Gmail into an easy-to-use social sales and marketing CRM, bringing individual email, calendar, and contacts into a shared team solution, and enriching contact and business profiles with social insights so you can build rapport with someone before reaching out.

How will Nimble change the way business is done?

Nimble helps you make digital connections, personally and at scale. For example, I was recently asked to speak at Microsoft Inspire.

As a means to market my business, we imported a Twitter list of the previous year’s conference attendees into Nimble, identified the top 200 influencers based on their Klout scores and interest area, and began doing one-to-one outreach.

By Nimbling individuals social footprint and history of interactions, our efforts generated a 50% email open rate and 25 total meetings. The campaign targeted executives, product managers, and people that managed the different parts of the business.

Because of this, Nimble landed a sizable deal with Microsoft; the company is bundling Nimble with 50 million Outlook mobile handsets and 100 million Office 365 users as the new add-in to Office and Outlook.

Today, we are in the process of rolling out Nimble Smart Contact Manager across all Office 365 productivity applications; the Web (Edge, Chrome and Firefox); in Web applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Skype and Microsoft Teams; as well as on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

What does the shift to AI mean for making digital connections?

The more digital we get, the more human we need to be. Because we are all over-connected, we need help as stuff falls through the cracks.

Imagine if someone could look at all your email and social signals, apply business intelligence on that person and their company, and then surfaced the most important signals to; you can then do that human thing.

The problem is there’s no one system of relationship management for a business. I think that’s where we’re going; a universal relationship that “automagically” builds itself and works with you wherever you work.

I want to know who Kevin Price is wherever I am online. I want to know if anybody on my team knows him. I want to walk in your digital footprint, and I want to connect in whatever channel I can. That’s not necessarily AI.

It’s just more effective bringing these things together. AI’s coming, but not quite yet.

—-

Jon has already struck gold once in the CRM market. With Nimble, he is clearly on a mission to re-imagine how customer relationship management platforms are bringing a true sense of authentic connection back into customer relations, an essential part of any brand’s longevity and efficacy in an over connected landscape.

Nimble News from Microsoft Inspire

MS Inspire, the annualMicrosoft partner event, has just ended, wrapping up a flurry of news and announcements from Microsoft and its channel partners.

Most announcements were interesting; some more than others, especially when considering these items together. I’ve been followingNimbleCRM and its founderJon Ferrarafor a while now, so I was particularly interested in hearing about the launch of itsglobal reseller programand itssocial relationships insights add-infor Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook Desktop/Mobile. Nimble made its announcements within the context of Microsoft’s increasing its emphasis on partner success, as evinced by itsOne Commercial Partnerinitiative to bring together partner-focused teams from across the company and its newISV Cloud Embedservices offerings for partners.

Why is this interesting?

Microsoft’s lifeblood is its partner ecosystem. In all likelihood, the company has the biggest, most robust partner channel around. Microsoft basically sets, and resets, the gold standard with their constantly evolving partner strategies.

A case in point is Microsoft’s announcement to incentivize its partner-focused teams to sell 3rd party partner solutions with Microsoft first party solutions, Microsoft is making it even easier for MSP/CSV and ISV partners to leverage synergies and add value to customers, profits to partners and stickiness to Microsoft products.

We also see Microsoft’s Azure co-sell program taking further steps with ISV Cloud Embed. This new program allows partners to embed Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps, and Microsoft Flow into their front- and back-office solutions. (I wouldn’t be surprised if LinkedIn were also integrated into this mix in the near future). If you think about it, this co-sell program looks a lot like Microsoft’s embedded Visual Basic for Applications on steroids. Lots of steroids.

Nimble is following an ecosystem strategy, too. The company has been co-developing its light-weight social CRM with Microsoft and integrated into the Microsoft stack for well over a year now. The latter is showcased by the new social insights add-in for MS Outlook and Office 365, the former by launching its own global reseller program in combination with becoming a Microsoft Gold ISV Partner.

At the same time. Nimble stays committed to the Google stack it was originally developed on, therefore running a two-pronged technology strategy.

My Take

This is a thing.

As I havewrittena few times, Microsoft owns a technology stack that should worry other business application vendors. Microsoft strives to, and has the potential to, become the fabric that connects enterprises of all sizes with their stakeholders. In cooperation with its partners, Microsoft’s reach spans everything from the hardware powering cloud-based and on-premise data centers to the hardware in the hands of users and customers.

Microsoft also has the software to connect the two. After nearly missing the SaaS wave, the writing’s on the wall: Azure will surpass AWS as the infrastructure of choice for businesses big and small.

From my point of view, there are only two concerns (three, if you count the possibility of a major strategic stuff-up, which seems to be highly unlikely):

First, I still do not see a Microsoft e-commerce platform that has the potential to compete head-on with the likes of SAP Hybris, Salesforce Commerce Cloud, or Oracle’s ATG. With the world going more digital almost by the minute, I don’t understand why this gap remains.

The second concern stems from the innovator’s dilemma. Microsoft is well on its way to crossing the chasm, meaning that it is drifting (or has drifted) into the Enterprise market from Axapta and Navision, the SMB ‘roots’ of Dynamics.

This is where Nimble comes into the picture. With its strong Microsoft-centric strategy and solid credibility with small businesses, Nimble opens the door to SMBs adopting Microsoft’s business applications. Many, if not most, of them are running Microsoft Office and/or Microsoft Outlook already. Nimble is an easy entry point into the business applications market, which in turn offers Microsoft and its partners the opportunity to grow small business customers into the Dynamics offerings as they grow.

By leveraging Microsoft’s partnering programs while simultaneously setting up its own reseller program, Nimble is attempting to create a triple win for Microsoft, its channel partners and for itself. Given that Jon accomplished this previously with GoldMine (GoldMine has over 5 Million customers and 5,000 Reseller Partners, and it was Microsoft’s #1 ISV partner in the 90s), I don’t see any reason why this strategy wouldn’t succeed here as well. .

Nimble’s strategy is bolstered by its continued support of the Google stack since both Microsoft and Google are the operating systems of businesses. Google and Google Apps are especially interesting for smaller businesses.

The only shadow that I see in this rosy picture is Nimble’s current pricing model. They shed their free tier a while ago and settled for a $25 per user, per month model. The free Nimble Social Insights Add-In for Microsoft Outlook and Office 365 alleviates this to some extent. However, the free edition is still limited, and, considering Nimble addresses the SMB market with a capital S, there is a sizeable jump from free to $25/month/user. Jon hinted that Nimble will address this with an upcoming edition of a Nimble Contact Manager for Teams without advanced features, which will be priced at around $10/month/user.

So, in summary, Nimble is pursuing a sound strategy here, albeit one with a final question mark: Amazon. It will be interesting to see what moves Amazon makes in the Cloud Productivity Platform market over the next years.

Nimble CRM, a startup that's rethinking how cloud-based business tools should enhance the relationship between small businesses and their customers, launched a channel program Wednesday to align with more solution providers in the Microsoft and Google channels.

The software developer based in Santa Monica, Calif., is recruiting partners looking to boost the capabilities of Microsoft Office 365 and Google G Suite by seeding those popular productivity suites with data from social media sites and leading CRM platforms, said Jon Ferrara, Nimble's founder and CEO.

Office 365 and G Suite have become "the operating system of a business," said Ferrara, who played a pioneering role in the development of CRM technology through his previous venture, GoldMine Software.

To prepare his company to support a formal channel, Ferrara hired Kevin Turner to be his director of strategic partner development. Turner founded Boss Systems, a leading GoldMine VAR back in the heyday of that groundbreaking vendor; a later channel venture, Model Metric, was acquired by Salesforce.

Nimble's offering culls data from productivity tools such as email, calendars and contact lists, then integrates data from social platforms like LinkedIn and sales and marketing platforms like Salesforce to put comprehensive customer profiles in front of users.

It's an easy add-on for partners who want to enhance their Office 365 and G Suite practices, Ferrara said, one that many solution providers could benefit from using internally before training customers.

"We have a team of people and programs that will help the VAR modernize their own sales and marketing tools, and then start doing it for the customers themselves," he said.

Ferrara said he sees "many VARs using Autotask or ConnectWise and not using modern software."

Nimble CRM, which started selling its offering back in 2013, already has 100 partners through an informal channel.

"Now is the time we're ready to invest in the resources, scale what we're doing, and also invest in our new partners for their success," he said.

Ferrara points to GoldMine, which swelled to more than 5,000 partners, as an example of a software vendor that didn't in any way compete with VARs, but instead saw those partners as an extension of its own business.

"It's one thing to sign someone up," he said, "and another thing to work hand-in-hand with them to help them grow their business."

Trials sold through Nimble's website all become leads for VARs to convert, he said.

Nimble's channel program was introduced at the Microsoft Inspire conference in Washington, D.C. The startup recently became a Microsoft Gold Certified ISV.

At the Microsoft partner conference, Nimble also unveiled a new freemium feature for Office 365 called Smart Contacts. The app, which also works through Outlook desktop and iOS, synchronizes emails, calendars and contacts with a team relationship manager enhanced by social and business profiles.

Van Murray is CEO of NeoCloud, a solution provider based in Raleigh, N.C., that's added Nimble's solution to its Office 365 practice.

The add-on "helps us create more value for our customers, differentiates us from our competitors and increases profitability," Murray told CRN.

"Nimble is our Trojan horse into businesses to connect with decision-makers and make Office 365 sticky in customer accounts," he said.

Nimble, a developer of a social sales and marketing CRM solution for individuals and businesses, has introduced Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop, and iOS that delivers instant social business insights on people and companies.

The Smart Contacts App enables users to create instant live profiles from team and personal email messages, contact list, calendar appointments, and social engagements. The profiles also include company insights such as industry, number of employees, revenue, and more. The add-in provides engagement tracking, reporting, and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders. Multi-channel support delivers people and company sites across the Web (via Chrome, Safari, and Firefox plug-ins), in Web applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Skype, and Microsoft teams, in addition to email, calendar, and contacts in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop, and on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

“The biggest cause of business communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their company is about,” says Jon Ferrara , CEO of Nimble. “Nimble has reimagined relationship management with a simply smarter relationship manager add-in that works for you, delivering critical contact background details right inside your Office 365 and Outlook inbox.”

Nimble is available in two versions: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user per month. The new add-in is available to all Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac, and Outlook iOS users. Existing Outlook users can use Nimble to get insights on contacts and companies and upgrade to the business edition to access team social sales and marketing functionalities.

CRM Talk Bonus Episode: Jon Ferrara of Nimble on CRM Switch Podcast

A discussion with Jon Ferrara about managing relationships where you can have conversations.

Jon’s passion is to build relationship platforms that help other people achieve their goals. Since starting GoldMine in the late 1980’s, Jon has believed that the more people you can help grow, the more you’ll grow.

In this episode, Jon identifies the many types of people beyond customers and prospects who businesspeople should be connecting with on a regular basis.

Jon reveals how to stay top of mind with people in many different roles and what you should do to get people to call you rather than you calling them.

We also discuss today’s announcement of Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS.

Nimble, a provider of social sales and marketing CRM, today released Nimble Smart Contacts, a freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop, and iOS that delivers instant social business insights on people and companies.

Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles for Office 365 and Outlook users everywhere they work.

Nimble's add-in for Outlook includes the following:

Live Profiles from team and personal email messages, contacts lists, calendar appointments, and social engagements;

Social Contact Profile Matching with rich contact and company insights;

Contact Insights, including the person's name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, and social identities;

Company Insights, including biography, industry, number of employees, year founded, keywords, company type, revenue, ticker, CEO name, address, and phone number;

Engagement tracking, reporting, and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders within context enhance personal and team productivity;

Multichannel support that delivers people and company insights seamlessly across the Web (via Chrome, Safari and Firefox plug-ins), in Web applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Skype, and Microsoft Teams in addition to email, calendar and contacts, in thecloud with Office 365, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on iOS and Android mobile devices.

"The biggest cause of business communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their company is about," said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, in a statement. "Nimble has reimagined relationship management with a simply smarter relationship manager add-in that works for you, delivering critical contact background details right inside your Office 365 and Outlook inbox."

"Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world," said Rob Howard, director of Office product marketing at Microsoft, in a statement. "Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble add-in for Outlook is a logical step."

Nimble comes in two versions: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user per month.

Microsoftusers now have one less reason to launchExcel— thanks to a new integration by Microsoft itself.

MicrosoftCorporation (NASDAQ: MSFT) has partnered with Nimble to offer the Santa Monica, California company’s Smart Contacts App as a freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook desktop and iOS.

The app delivers instant social business insights on people and companies, creating live profiles from team and personal email messages, contact lists, calendar appointments and social engagements — without having to leave Office 365 or Outlook.

No more Googling new contacts. No more combingLinkedIn, Twitter and company websites for information about them. No more painstakingly adding all that info — name, company, titles, location, experience, education, connections or shared interests — into a spreadsheet.

Instead, Nimble finds all that stuff, enabling users to spend less time on menial research and more time on meaningful outreach directly from email messages, calendar appointments and their mobile phones.

“The biggest cause of business communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their company is about,” Nimble founder and CEOJon Ferrarasaid in astatement. Nimble delivers this contact info “right inside your Office 365 and Outlook inbox.”

“Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish so connecting that capability through the new Nimble add-in for Outlook is a logical step,” added said Rob Howard, Director of Office Product Marketing atMicrosoftCorp.

Some of the business insights Nimble delivers include

Social Contact Profile Matching with rich contact and company insights

Contact Insights including the person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education and social identities

Company Insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year founded, keywords, company type, revenue, ticker, CEO name, address and phone

Engagement tracking, reporting and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders within context enhance personal and team productivity

In addition, multi-channel support delivers these insights seamlessly across the web.

The Nimble Smart Contacts App is available in two versions: a free add-in available to all Office 365, Outlook desktop and Outlook iOS users, and a Business edition for $25 per user per month offering team social sales and marketing functionalities.

Nimble will be available to Outlook Mobile Android users in the next few months.

MicrosoftOffice 365 has 100 million users and Outlook mobile has 40 million users globally.

Nimble, which closed a $9 million Series A this spring, has grown to 30 team members worldwide and has more than 100,000 subscribers with more than 10,000 paying customers. The company is currently operating at near-break-even in terms of costs versus revenue, Ferrara told me.

The CEO further discussed Nimble and its deal withMicrosoftvia email, including why Nimble is needed, what Microsoft invested in the company, and how Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers inspired the company’s name.

Why is Nimble needed?

People are on absolute communication overload. With so many contacts, touchpoints and interactions, people need a true social relationship manager that builds itself from email, contacts and calendars and social networks — which are people’s de facto contact managers — and helps every person on a team engage with customers, partners and influencers armed with business context and social insights so they can develop a rapport before sales or marketing outreach efforts are even made.

Imagine this: If I am in Twitter, if I am in Outlook or Gmail, Instagram, Facebook, the company's CRM, if I am reading a post [on L.A. Biz], I want to know who Annlee Ellingson is and if I’ve ever spoken or connected with her. I want to know if anybody on my team knows her. I want to walk in her digital footprint to get to know her, and I want to be able to connect on whatever appropriate, relevant and authentic channel I can. That’s what Nimble helps people do, by surfacing a customer’s history of interactions with a business and displaying the important signals that can help facilitate a genuine connection.

The email inbox is still the most widely used de facto contact manager, and Office 365/Outlook is used by billions of people who all need to better manage relationships. There are estimations that more than 80 percent of companies worldwide do not use any contact manager or CRM application at all.

With this step of integrating deeper into theMicrosoftfabric, Nimble comes far closer to my vision of becoming the world’s simple, smart and social contact manager for individuals and teams. Our partnership with Microsoft gives Nimble access to a huge number of potential business users who need a universal relationship manager and for whom Dynamics 365 andLinkedInSales Navigator are too expensive and too clumsy, or just plainly not useful to people with simple needs.

What other Nimble-Microsoft integrations are in the works?

We are in the process of rolling out Nimble Smart Contact Manager across all Office 365 productivity applications; the web (Edge, Chrome and Firefox); in web applications such asMicrosoftDynamics,Skypeand Microsoft Teams; as well as in email, calendar and contacts in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and Android).

What is the difference between the free and Business versions of the Nimble Smart Contacts Add-In?

People can start using instant Live Profiles on contacts and companies from email messages, contacts lists, calendar appointments and social engagements using our freemium add-in. Nimble works for you by building the profiles automatically as you work, and works with you by delivering these insights across multiple platforms.

Businesses upgrade to the business edition to access team social sales and marketing functionalities including team contacts, engagement tracking, reporting and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders within teams.

Microsofthas signed a reseller agreement whereby they will soon start to bundle Nimble and Office 365 to be resold by Microsoft resellers through a Microsoft Partner portal to Microsoft customers. Microsoft has also funded parts of our Nimble product development, specifically our development of Nimble integrated with Microsoft Azure.

Is the deal exclusive, or will Nimble strike similar partnerships with other software providers?

In our over-connected and over-communicated world, everyone needs or wants to be more effective at managing critical personal and business relationships, yet it's getting harder and harder everyday. People talk about how Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were such “nimble” and graceful dancers. They also talk about how “nimble” small businesses are. When we came up with the name Nimble, we envisioned empowering people to be able to dance with their relationships like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. To be able to be nimble like a small business, no matter what their size.

Nimble Launches Add-in for Microsoft Office 365 and Outlook, Delivering Social Business Insights on People and Companies

Nimble, the pioneer of Social Sales and Marketing CRM, today announced Nimble Smart Contacts App, a new freemium add-in for Microsoft Office 365, Outlook desktop and iOS that delivers instant social business insights on people and companies. Based on the premise that it should be easier for people to connect authentically in today’s over-connected world, Nimble synchronizes individual emails, calendars and contacts into a shared team relationship manager enriched with rich social and business profiles for O365 and Outlook users everywhere they work.

Nimble’s add-in for Outlook Delivers Business Insights Everywhere You Work

Nimble creates instant Live Profiles from team and personal email messages, contacts lists, calendar appointments and social engagements

Social Contact Profile Matching introduces rich contact and company insights

Contact Insights include the Person’s Name, Company Name, Title, Biography, Location, Keywords, Work Experience, Education, and Social Identities

Company Insights include Biography, Industry, Number of Employees, Year Founded, Keywords, Company Type, Revenue, Ticker, CEO Name, Address and Phone

Engagement tracking, reporting and the ability to assign follow-up tasks and schedule reminders within context enhance personal and team productivity

Multi-channel support delivers people and company insights seamlessly across the Web (via Chrome, Safari and Firefox plug-ins), in Web applications such as Microsoft Dynamics, Skype and Microsoft Teams in addition to email, calendar and contacts, in the cloud with Office 365, on the desktop (Windows and Mac) and on mobile devices (iOS and Android)

“The biggest cause of business communication failure is lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their company is about,”saysJon Ferrara, CEO ofNimbleand founder of the pioneering CRM, GoldMine.“Nimble has reimagined relationship management with a Simply Smarter Relationship Manager add-in that works for you, delivering critical contact background details right inside your Office 365 and Outlook inbox,” adds Ferrara.

The new Nimble Smart Contacts is designed to help Office 365 and Outlook professionals spend less time on menial research and more time on meaningful outreach directly from their email messages, calendar appointments, and mobile phone.

“Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world,” saidRob Howard, Director, Office Product Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble add-in for Outlook is a logical step.”

Nimble’s Smart Contacts Add-In for Office 365 & Outlook provides my team and our customers the insights we need on people and companies for us to be able to engage in a relevant, informed and authentic way,” saidRalph Keipert, President/Managing Director at Tahoe Partners, a Nimble Solutions Partner.“Having contextual information from social streams and digital footprints helps build business relationships. Having all of this information in our inbox as we’re talking with customers has transformed how we do business.”

Pricing and Availability

Nimble comes in two versions today: a free Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in and Nimble Business edition at $25 per user per month. The new Nimble Smart Contacts Add-in is available to all Office 365, Outlook desktop Windows/Mac and Outlook iOS users. Existing Outlook users can use Nimble to get insights on contacts and companies and upgrade to the business edition to access team social sales and marketing functionalities. Nimble will be available for Outlook Mobile Android users over the next few months. Nimble delivers relationship insights everywhere you work includingG Suite,Outlook,Chrome,Safari,Firefox,Hootsuite,iOSandAndroid.

ABOUT NIMBLE–Nimbleis the pioneer of social sales and marketing CRM for individuals and teams. It allows people to intelligently nurture relationships across email and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence and marketing automation into a powerful social selling solution. Nimble was founded by Jon Ferrara, the co-founder of GoldMine, a pioneer of SFA, CRM, Relationship Management and Marketing Automation. For more information, visitwww.nimble.com. Nimble can be found onFacebook,Twitter,YouTubeandInstagram.

Microsoft quietly unveiled at its Inspire conference Monday an online marketplace through which its channel can directly provision solutions from the software giant's technology partners, potentially upending the current software distribution paradigm across its vast ecosystem.

The B2B platform, calledThird Party Offers, was introduced in a soft launch in the Office 365 section of the exhibition floor of the partner conference in Washington, D.C. The new cloud software marketplace aims to make it easier for solution providers to bundle third-party products with Microsoft offerings like Office 365.

Third Party Offers delivers to partners a catalog of ISV products they can purchase, deploy and manage for customers.

"Third Party Offers helps ISVs with SaaS-ready apps connect and sell through the Microsoft partner channel," reads a Microsoft brochure distributed at the event.

Microsoft, Redmond, Wash., will beta-test the commerce portal over the next six months with select partners, according to the brochure.

The soft launch includes channel partners with MSP or CSP business models and roughly 20 ISVs, including popular offerings like Zendesk and DocuSign.

Third Party Offers will greatly enable ISVs to leverage the channel to extend their reach, freeing resources to invest more in their sales and marketing capabilities, said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble CRM, a Microsoft technology partner based in Santa Monica, Calif., that's participating in the trial program.

What Microsoft's AppSource marketplace did to ease selling SaaS directly to the end user, Third Party Offers will essentially do for channel partners, Ferrara added.

Currently, ISVs that want to sell SaaS solutions through an online marketplace must build custom integrations with a hodgepodge of commerce platforms offered by 2-Tier CSPs—large Microsoft resellers that distribute solutions to other partners.

Many are offered by large distributors, like Ingram Micro, whichpurchased Odin Services Automationin 2015 to power its own cloud marketplace. Others come from telecoms or web hosting companies that have built their own commerce platforms or embed ones from vendors like AppDirect.

Microsoft will streamline that process to drive sales of comprehensive solutions through its channel. Once in general release, Third Party Offers will be available to all Microsoft technology and channel partners, Ferrara said.

ISVs will only have to on board once to the Microsoft platform, Ferrara said, and "once we're in there, we can start selling through any part of that channel, or all of it."

Smaller CSPs will be able to provision Microsoft and third-party solutions directly from that cloud commerce portal. And the 2-Tier CSPs can connect their own marketplaces to the portal through APIs, avoiding the time and expense common in developing an integration with every third-party vendor.

"They [Microsoft] know that when you mix third- and first-party offerings, it makes them both more sticky and gives VARs more ammunition for making additional margins on services," Ferrara said.

Products from ISVs like Nimble CRM are underpinned by Microsoft technology and drive adoption and continued use of Microsoft offerings like Azure, PowerBI, Dynamics and PowerApps, Ferrara said.

The commerce platform will make it much easier for Microsoft's channel to sell solutions to business decision-makers from the front and back office, Ferrara told CRN.

The CSP or MSP will get a line-item bill from Microsoft including all the solutions they sell through Third Party Offers.

"Microsoft is very good at this. If they make a commitment to the market and to the channel to build this, I think it's going to be huge," Ferrara said.

Behind the project is Ron Huddleston, commercial vice president of Microsoft's One Commercial Partner organization, who previously played a major role in developing the Salesforce AppExchange.

Is It Ever Too Late to Use a CRM? With Jon Ferrara of Nimble (Podcast)

In episode 54, hosts Elizabeth Larkin and Gene Marks are joined by Jon Ferrara of Nimble and answer the following question:

“I have owned and run a yoga studio for 20 years and I’m wondering if it’s too late to start using a customer relationship management system. Is there a downside to starting after you’ve launched your business?

Who is a Social Customer?by Margie Gradwohl

In our last blog, Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble, and I discussed what a social business is, and it all came down to talking and connecting with social customers. Today I’ll be sharing Jon’s story-telling approach to describe who the social customer is and how to connect with social customers throughout their journey.

Deep-dive into the new customer journey

To be a social business today, you must be digitally connected with the social customer, because as Jon puts it, “They’re not walking through the front door of your business on Main Street, USA anymore. Much of the buyer journey is done digitally. For instance, there are many times when I’m surfing on Twitter or Instagram, and I see something that catches my eye, and I find myself looking at that product or service.”

Imagine billions of conversations going on around you every second of every day right outside your front door... these are happening within what we introduced last week as the “social river”. There are all these conversations, all these social customers, and even other social businesses flowing in this river. Jon passionately explains,

“Put on your galoshes, get out in that river, and start participating in conversations and interactions out there!”

Last week we touched on the shift in the new customer journey, referencing McKinsey & Company’s published article about the consumer decision journey. Today, however, I’m going to share with you a story that Jon shared with me to take a deep-dive into understanding that change:

“I personally like Sony TVs, but I recently had a couple Sony products that died within the first two years. I call this infant failure, because they really should not die that early. So, I set out to buy a new 40-inch flat-screen TV to replace this one, which at the time was a rather large sized flat-screen. However, I didn’t go to the store or company website to begin my journey. My trigger was that my TV died; my initial consideration set was built by going to a variety of places and participating in conversations with other people about what products they like, what services they consider to be some of the best, and what their evaluations are after making purchases. So, I built my active evaluation set, and at that point I had already completed 60% of my buyer journey.”

You see, your customers are doing their own homework. They are not going into stores, talking to sales people, reviewing marketing materials, and so forth to initiate their decision-making process. Instead, they’re having conversations with others like them about the products and services they’ve been triggered to pursue on forums, websites, social media platforms (like Twitter), or Apps (like Yelp). Jon adds, “They might go to your website or store at the moment of purchase, but you need to be prepared to serve them at this point, not sell them.” This might mean giving a recommendation to somebody else’s product to meet their needs; if you truly take care of somebody and focus on meeting their needs rather than pushing your product/service, then down the road they will not only consider you, but they’ll trust you and tell their friends about you, too! Jon’s TV buying story continues …

“So here I am, I’ve compiled a list of Samsung, LG, and all these other brands; I’m not even considering Sony. I go into the store, my moment of purchase, with an idea to consider these other brands, look at the TVs, and I stop to listen to the sales rep. He wasn’t pushing me on any particular brand or TV and took the time to genuinely listen to what I needed. For this, he became my trusted advisor. In the end, I bought a Sony, even though I told myself I wouldn’t. The sales rep demonstrated clear understanding of my needs, articulated the benefits of the Sony and how it met my needs, and demonstrated that it was the best product, best price, and best combination of features. Even after the sale, the post-purchase experience, I continued to do my research and considered possibly buying something else, but, in the end I loved it and bought another for my bedroom. What’s more, I now tell people this story all the time!”

Jon told this story of his consumer decision making process not to make you take a hard look at Sony, but to really paint the picture of the new social customer and how they make their buying decisions. With 60% of their journey complete before they connect with a company, it’s clear that companies now need to focus on participating with social customers and getting involved in the initial and active consideration phases.

Participate with the new social customer

The key to participating with the new social customer has already been provided. Think back to our previous blogs, Building Your Brand and Network & What is Social?As you focus on building your own personal brand and professional network, you must also think about your company brand and network. Your company is becoming a social business, which means you need to empower your social employee— in Jon’s words,

“Share inspirational and educational content, stay top-of-mind with the 5 Es on a daily basis, and become part of the new customer buying journey.”

This will set you and your teammates up to be your customers’ trusted advisor, so they will not only come to you when they are making a buying decision, but more importantly as Jon points out, they will invite their friends along with them.

You can kiss away the days of participating with customers by cold calling and mad-men marketing. Your new focus needs to be:

Establish relationships and change the perception of sales people to trusted advisors

Transform the idea of selling into serving

Jon concludes, “This might sound a little 1970s, but ultimately I believe that social media is transforming the way we buy, the way we sell, and the way we interact into a ‘small-town culture’, where the brand that a store or business has is built solely on the promises made and experiences delivered. We do this by being present, listening to their 3 Ps of life, and ideally adding value. Good luck selling!"

Recap

To quickly recap Jon’s thoughtful commentary on who is a social customer:

The buyer journey has gone digital, and you and your business need to, too!

Understand the new customers’ new decision making process to get involved.

Empower your social employees to build their brand and network, and in turn reap the benefits to your company’s brand and network.

In essence, everyone has become a social customer.

Tune in on Thursday for the last blog to complete this collaboration series and learn What is Social Selling?

How Does "Social" Apply to Your Business?by Margie Gradwohl

Earlier this week I shared with you how toDevelop Your Personal Brand and Professional Network teaming up with Jon Ferrara from Nimble. The third part of this collaboration series will cover what a “social business” is and how it applies to you.

Old Customer Journey

According to Jon, “The world is changing radically around us every single second; every minute of every day there are billions of conversations, what I call the “social river,” going on outside your business. A typical business has a storefront, and the hope is that people will walk in. But, many times they don’t. Social business applies to you and everyone else because you need to get out of the store, get in the middle of the digital social river, and start having conversations with potential customers. Begin to participate in your customer’s journey!” In the old days of marketing and sales, Jon described the customer journey as essentially consisting of the following steps:

Yell at the customers about how great your products and services were

Expect customers to line up at your door

Sales people “bag ‘em and tag ‘em” and get their order

Send them to the customer service line, where conversation would be minimized

Several people and departments were involved in the process, but each department had walls between them—sales had walls between marketing, marketing had walls between support, support had walls between sales—and information was just thrown back and forth over the walls, creating a siloed effect. Each department assigned responsibilities to other departments for lead generation/capture, and many customers were lost.

New Customer Journey

“I truly believe the experience that you deliver at your company is critical to your business success." In fact, Jon uses this "equation" to describe the new age of the customer journey:

Company Brand = Promises Made + Experiences Delivered

In today’s landscape, the funnel of the old days is long gone and we are finding ourselves in more of a pretzel, where much of the experience is delivered digitally and each step of the journey interweaves with the previous and the next. This brought to light the consumer decision journey article published by McKinsey & Company. In short, the new decision making journey of customers falls within these steps:

There’s a trigger to make a sale

Initial consideration set is built-- “This is not done by visiting company websites, rather it’s by going where the conversations about products/services/offerings by people like you, or influencers of people like you, who will help to gather the initial set, do evaluations for you, ultimately make that moment of purchase, and then still evaluate whether you made the right decision.”

Loyalty loop occurs-- At this point you not only might buy it again, but now you’ll tell your friends about it too!

This new journey is one that you, as a social business, can participate in on a daily basis, “by getting outside into the social river to stay top of mind to your customers. As Mae West put it so well, ‘Out of sight is out of mind, and out of mind is out of money, honey.’”

Staying Top of Mind

As is typical, we compared staying top-of-mind in the old days versus now. In the old days, this was done through quarterly or monthly newsletters that would blast new prices and products. This type of marketing, however, doesn’t work anymore. Jon explains, “Go to your local newsstand…oh wait, you might not even be able to find it anymore because they’re disappearing and going digital. Thus, in these new days to participate in the customer journey and become a trusted advisor as a social business, I recommend you teach people to fish. If you teach people to fish, then they’ll figure out you sell fishing poles.” What he meant by that is giving knowledge away is business.

Jon broke down the 5 Es of “teaching people to fish” and staying top-of-mind as a social business:

Educate–with great, creative content

Enchant–use relevant content

Engage–with authenticity and intent to help them grow

Embrace–with the intent to…

Empower–them to achieve their dreams

If you do these things, you will succeed in engaging in the new customer journey, remaining top-of-mind, and developing yourself as trusted advisor and social business.

Be More Than a Faceless Corporate Business

“A social business isn’t built by providing inspiration and education just on your company brand and social media channels. Ideally, you are empowering each of your team members to build their brand as well,” Jon told me, hence why we developed the first blog as a how-to for individuals (i.e., your employees). Think about Jon’s previous statement that a company’s brand is built on the promises it makes and the experiences that it delivers. So, where is much of this experience delivered? Through customer-facing team members! By enabling and empowering your team members to build their brand and engage in the 5 Es themselves, you’ll humanize your brand. Jon so beautifully tied it all together:

“When they (your employees) share inspirational and educational content through business and employee avenues, each employee will be established as an expert in their field, reaching customers and influencers. People will identify and connect with this human identity that people identify and connect with, rather than a faceless corporate business.”

So, rather than establishing yourself as a company that is trying to sell something, focus on establishing your company as asomebody who is trying to serve customers. Jon says, “After all, service is the new sales.”

Drive Sustainability

If you invest in your team members in the ways described, you will, in turn, stay top-of-mind with your customers and build a tribe around your social business. Jon brilliantly described how this can evolve when he told a story about his wife’s garden and how it relates to our businesses:

“My wife is not only an artist, but she is also a sustainable landscaper. She takes me out into the garden that she has built around our home and shows me some of the things she is doing. One day, she took me into the garden and showed me this Monarch butterfly caterpillar in our yard. I said, ‘Wow! I didn’t know Monarch butterflies were even in southern California.’ She explained that they indeed are in southern California, and that she plants milk thistle in order to attract these Monarch butterflies. They then put their caterpillars there, and these caterpillars eat the aphids and other things that could negatively affect the garden. So, in all, she is planting things in the garden that will attract other plants and insects that will help to build the garden into a self-sustaining garden, alleviating the need to water, spray, weed, etc. In short, the garden begins to take care of itself. Isn’t this what we are trying to do with our businesses? To attract people around our businesses to help us grow?”

Just as this garden example demonstrates, building your business goes far beyond just connecting with prospects and customers to grow business sales. There is a dire need to transform simple connections to relationships and integrate everyone who participates in the journey into one complementary and sustainable network. Jon finished with:

“You need a central relationship platform that everybody in the company can participate in the conversations with the tribe and community that you’re building around your business. Go beyond connecting with prospects, customers, and influences, and connect with other businesses who can help you grow…much like Nimble partners with Microsoft as a company, with Microsoft solution providers, and other Microsoft ISVs. Create your own self-sustaining environment that will help you achieve your goals in your business. This is, ultimately, what a social business is about.”

Recap

To quickly recap this information-rich blog, below are the five key points:

Demolish the siloed effect by breaking down those traditional department walls

Understand the customer decision journey

Engage daily to stay top-of-mind (using the 5 Es)

Empower employees and reap the benefits as a company

Grow your tribe to encourage a self-sustaining social business

Wow! I’m loving this content and can’t wait to share next week’s blog Who is a Social Customer. Be sure to tune in!

How to Build Relationships That Grow (It's Not Through Marketing)by Drew Neisser

A dangerous lead given the audience of this column. But suspend your disbelief just for a moment. As the founder of Nimble, a relationship management app for those of us with thousands of contacts and no time to nurture them, Ferrara gathered 100,000 Nimble users and converted 15% of them to paid subscribers -- with no marketing budget at all.

How? By building value-adding relationships -- not with customers, but with the individuals that your customers trust. In other words, a more sophisticated take on influencer marketing. "Relationships drive everything on this planet, and if you can identify people that matter, reach out and build relevant and authentic pay-it-forward relationships, you can change the world," says Ferrara, who calls this "social selling."

In today's world, nurturing value-based relationships at scale is next to impossible for individuals and brands alike. Even marketing automation can't do it effectively. "We're all bombarded by messages that are not one-to-one, authentic, and relevant," Ferrara says. "So we throw those away and we toss them aside. If you can effectively enrich the contacts you have, segment properly, outreach in a one-to-one way, then you can drive your opens, your clicks, and your results through the roof."

Giving away your knowledgeThe first tenet of Ferrara's model, which may seem counterintuitive, is to give away your knowledge. Many believe that their expertise is their secret sauce, and that divulging the recipe relieves them of any leverage for profitability. To the contrary, Ferrara says. With Nimble, he offered services for free, to build up a user base, before establishing a paywall. "You need to provide immediate value whenever you're building and delivering to the customer," he says. It's the first of his five E's: "You educate, enchant, engage, embrace, and empower your customer."

Understanding your peopleTo better know your other half, it's important to do your due diligence, which Ferrara says many companies skip entirely. Start with your records: "Ultimately every business has a goldmine in their accounting system. Who did you sell to before? What did it look like?" From there, scale up. "Who do you have in your CRM or your lead list that looks like those best people? And then, net-new leads that look like that person, and then outreach to them in some way that's different," and focus on optimizing your channel, message, audience and schedule.

And because relationships take two, you must participate in the other parties' due diligence. "If you want to build relationships, open up your shirt, roll up your sleeves, share a little bit about yourself. Don't just share a bunch of quotes and business crap in your social. Share what you're passionate about," Ferrara says. "I'm passionate about family, food, and outdoors. If you want to get to know me, spend five seconds on my Instagram and you'll learn a lot better how to connect with me than five minutes on my LinkedIn."

Aligning promise to experienceRelationships also require integrity, which means ensuring that the knowledge you share leads to tangible results. "What will help you grow your business is aligning the promises that you make to the experience that you deliver," Ferrara says. At scale, this requires a group effort. "Much of that experience happens through your customer-facing business team members. So if you can empower them to deliver a delight at every point of contact, I think that you can be really, really successful."

Tactical differencesFerrara acknowledges that marketing does serve a purpose -- for consistent messaging and business development, for example -- but that it's not the most effective approach to growth. "Marketing is at that high level, where you're dropping bombs at scale in order to soften up the battlefield. But to win that war, you need to put boots on the ground," he says. "The boots on the ground are your customer-facing business team members, and for them to be effective, they need intelligence, and they need to be able to engage at scale."

Studying scaleFinally, to bring Nimble to scale, Ferrara became a student of history, and recommends that every marketer do his or her industry homework. His team recognized that Microsoft was winning the productivity war against Google with Office 365, and built an integration that Microsoft currently gives to 100 million Outlook users.

"Microsoft is having me teach their VARs social sales marketing, and they're starting to gift their VARs Nimble," Ferrara says, referring to value-added resellers. "Well, guess what? People sell what they know, and they know what they use. So history is going to repeat itself, and we will be at, I think, $100 billion-plus in revenue, and tens of millions of users, in the not-too distant future."

A ringing endorsement for relationship management if ever there were one.

Build Your Personal Brand & Professional Networkby Margie Gradwohl

In last week’s blog, I introduced Jon Ferrara, founder and CEO of Nimble. He shared his experience as a successful entrepreneur, the challenges sellers face, and the changing sales landscape which drives the need for social sales and marketing. Today’s blog will deep-dive into what Jon believes is the first step in social sales: how to develop your personal brand and professional network. At first it seemed a little odd to start the discussion around building a personal brand and network, but Jon quickly explained that he likes to begin the journey on this topic for a reason— we can easily understand how this applies to us as individuals, but we will quickly begin to reveal how it affects and applies to the business aspect as well.

In the old days, a network was built on promises made and products delivered. Relationships were formed by getting to know people through face-to-face encounters in the office, looking at diplomas and awards hanging on the walls, identifying books they read on their bookshelves, and so on. All of these provided clues as to how you might be able to spark the relationship and help them achieve their purpose. Jon describes the new age, if you will, as social media bringing us back to that ‘small town,’ where your reputation is built by each connection or contact that is made. Each of us is getting to know people electronically through a number of networks, which is overwhelming and leading to being over-connected and over-communicated.”

Relationships are the key to business success (and personal success in life), yet we are over-connected to the point of having thousands of people in our networks. So, if your network is your net worth, what are the steps to getting this right? Well, Jon described it perfectly when he said,

The first step to developing your professional net worth is taking control of your personal brand. Perhaps my favorite part of this discussion was Jon’s first action item— clearly figure out and articulate your 3 Ps: Passion, Plan, and Purpose of life. He says, “Ideally that passion and purpose is helping other people grow, because service is absolutely the new sales.” In order to be seen, he says, “Think about it…do a Bing search of yourself. What shows up?” Prioritize your brand development across all critical networks that prospective customers and influencers frequent, and amplify this development by sharing content that is inspirational and educational around how you might help people become better, smarter, and faster. At this point you will establish yourself as someone who can help them grow, and you can expect them to contact you!

“Your goal should be to be seen by people (online) in a way that your 3 Ps are effectively communicated when you are searched for online.”

Invest in Your Relationships

Relationships are the key to business success. Identify who matters, reach out to build a relevant relationship, and become a trusted advisor. Up to this point, it’s been clear that the shift in social selling has created this issue of over-connectedness. So, if theories such as the Dunbar Limit exist, arguing that we can only successfully manage 100-200 people in our network, I asked Jon how one can manage their network on a daily basis? He stated that first and foremost you shouldn’t be yelling about how great you, your products, or your services are. Instead, “you should be teaching other people how they can be great. Doing this on a daily basis establishes you as a trusted advisor and sets you up to participate in your customer’s journey.” Second, he explains that you need the right tools.

“The goal is to be top-of-mind to people who matter. You need tools for this…tools that integrate into key business signals such as contacts, conversations, email, and calendar. We live in Microsoft Office 365, our cloud-based productivity platform, but we need something that unifies and enriches it with the people and company data. That way we don’t have to Bing-search everybody.

I have a background in relationship management, having built a platform that was the first relationship platform to blend sales, marketing, and contact management into a single platform (called GoldMine). This, in fact, predates Outlook. Now, I’ve created Nimble, not to replace existing contact platforms, but to enrich and add value. Office 365 is your business operating system, the foundation of contacts and conversations via email, calendar, address book, but what you need is something that unifies it all into a singular platform so when you look at a contact record, you have the context—history of interactions on email, calendar, and social for that person and their company. That database cannot be static. It needs to get updated daily and be capable of being taken with us into every engagement. It’s your job to be prepared for every engagement before you ever connect with another person. You need to know who they are, what they’re about, and how you might be able to serve them daily.”

Developing relationships requires investments of time and energy, as well as having the right tools to make this step easier. In this changing sales world, it’s imperative that you take control of building relationships to grow your professional network and nurture them daily. In fact, Jon described relationships as being similar to a garden. “If you go out to your garden and tend to it daily, it’s so much easier to tend to that relationship. If you ignore your garden for a period of time, maybe a week, it becomes more work to repair it. If you let it go too long, the garden is going to look so irreparable that you’re going to think the easiest thing to do is rototill the garden and start over. That’s not what you want to do with your network. That’s not what you want to do with your relationships. So, go out there on a daily basis and tend and nurture them. If you can do that, you’ll achieve your 3 Ps in life.”

The easiest way to achieve these goals is to figure out how you can help other people become better, faster, stronger

Set yourself up as trusted advisor by giving knowledge away

If you complete these points regularly, you will build your brand and network of prospects, customers, and influencers…who will then do your marketing and sales for you. This wraps up our thought provoking blog with Jon this week. Tune in laster this week to learn about what a social business is and how social applies to business. In the meantime, get started on building your personal brand and professional network!

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble, to talk at a high level about his expertise in relationship management and social sales and marketing. His journey began with struggles to manage contacts, sales follow-ups, and marketing within a technology company before Outlook or Salesforce existed. He pioneered contact and relationship management as a co-founder of GoldMine Software, one of the early innovations in CRM and marketing automation. Jon, a highly successful software entrepreneur, is now the founder and CEO of Nimble, the #1 rated social sales and marketing CRM add-in to Microsoft Dynamics 365. Read our conversation below to gain insight to Jon’s journey with social selling, and how it can help you transform your business.

M: Jon, what do you see is one of the key problem sellers are faced with today?

J: The evolution of social media has forever changed the way we work, play, and communicate in business and everyday life. We all feel over-connected, over-communicated, and overwhelmed. Just look at your inbox … we’re being buried with conversations and communications. But, ultimately, we need to become part of those conversations and stand out because

Our Network + Our Personal Brand = Our New Net Worth

This transformation has affected the customer journey, and in response, we must change the way we listen and engage with our buyers. We have to change engagement and relationship management behaviors, because the world has changed around us.

If the world has changed the way they communicate, then that means the buyer has changed the way they buy. You now need to work with buyers that are different than the old-school marketing of yelling at people about how good your products and services are. Rather, you need to add value to your customers’ journey to build a relationship and establish yourself as their trusted advisor.

The concepts I am talking about are much more than just social selling. It’s really:

Social Business, which equals Social Marketing + Social Sales + Social Service

And ultimately we stop talking about social and start talking about a new way of doing business where our focus has shifted to customer-service/experience oriented-- helping others to succeed rather than “bagging, tagging, and getting orders.” Service is truly the new Sales.

M: Let’s pause for a moment. Would you mind giving an overview about yourself? Who is Jon?

J: I am a product of the space era (the 1960s) and grew up on my father’s car dealership. I was inspired by his entrepreneurial sales and marketing abilities, but at the same time decided I never wanted to do that. I wanted to become an astronaut and computer scientist. I studied computer science and my mentor was my uncle, who helped invent the radar microwave at MIT in the 1940s and later built satellite communication systems for NASA. That’s why I studied computer science, got my first job in aerospace, and after two years at a big corporation I discovered I liked smaller businesses so I went to work for a startup.

I became an entrepreneur by chance and necessity because I evolved into working for a technology startup in sales. Back in the day, there was no sales automation. I was given sheets of papers called leads, and I had to cold-call them to get an appointment and start a conversation with customers. I said, “there’s got to be a better way,” but I couldn’t find a program that integrated email, contact, and calendar with sales and marketing automation.

At age 29, I was too young and dumb to know any better, so I quit my job, and started a company called GoldMine that helped pioneer what is known today as contact management and CRM. I really believe the reason people loved GoldMine was because it blended your Outlook and Salesforce. Ultimately your conversations and relationship tracking should all be in one place.

M: Wow, very cool! How did you take your start-up to market?

J: We identified the influencers of our prospects. Influencer marketing is not a new thing; it actually goes back generations. If you can identify the influencers of your prospects and engage with them, they will then recommend you to their trusted customers. We went after the people who sold the network to those businesses and began to integrate into the products that the customers used.

M: So now you’re the founder and CEO of another great company. How did Nimble come about?

J: I was able to learn a lot about relationships, engagement, and social media in its early days of 2006-2008. I immediately saw an opportunity, because social media was going to change the way we all work and play. I looked for a tool that would integrate my social list of engagements from my contacts, but I couldn’t find it. When I began to look at contact management, I saw that it was quite broken. Email, contacts, and calendar weren’t linked together; they were three separate tabs in your browser. Today, you need to include social media and integrate these pieces to give contacts some context. Before you engage with someone, you should know what their business is about. Today you Bing them, tomorrow you’ll Nimble them because your relationship options should automatically work for you by building itself, and then work with you wherever you work. Nimble will layer in your email, contacts, and calendar, infuse it with people and company data on contacts and companies, and then work with you where you work.

That’s what a computer should be doing for you -- unifying all the contacts from not only your your Outlook address book and Google contacts, but also from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Google+, AngelList, Snapchat, and wherever you could be having conversations with customers.

If you want to stay top-of-mind with your customer, you need to set yourself up as a trusted advisor, and you can’t do that by talking about how great your products and services are. You should be talking about how you can help other people become better, smarter, faster.

M: I’m really looking forward to hearing and sharing your expertise, Jon. Give a quick run down on the blog topics we will be covering in the series and who should read these blogs.

J: Absolutely! We will cover:

How to build your personal brand and professional network

What is social business?

Who is a social customer?

What is social marketing, sales, and service?

This series is not just for sales people or just business owners. It is for any individual person or business who wants to learn how to stand out from the crowd, build their brand, build their community, and achieve business goals, which ideally will be helping other businesses and people grow.

Stay tuned for more valuable insights from Jon as we kick off this Nimble series. In the next blog, we will discuss how to build your personal brand and professional network, and how this will help you to stand out from the crowd.

My #1 Tool For Staying OrganizedBy Jeff Sheehan

With over 330,000 followers on Twitter, and 15,000+ connections on LinkedIn, it’s not easy keeping up and trying to engage with everyone who interacts with me. I’m a firm believer in what my friend, Bryan Kramer, has coined H2H connectivity, so I try my hardest.

In an effort to try to ensure that I became better organized, about a year ago I started to actively use Nimble. Jon Ferrara, the founder, had been in contact with me several years ago regarding his product, and I listened and tried it out, but didn’t really embrace it. I felt that I could exist without it. It was only after several years of trial and error and looking at other products that I realized that this was the solution that I had been looking for to effectively manage my contacts and interact with them. I truly regret that I had not started aggressively using it several years ago.

I can honestly say that Nimble has now become my #1 tool for staying organized and I use it daily.

What is Nimble CRM?

Nimble is a simple to use, inexpensive CRM with a modern interface. More importantly, as someone who practices and teaches about social selling, I rely heavily on it and its social media interface and integration to make my life a lot more productive.

I have the ability to automatically create, segment, outreach and engage prospects and customers. It works well with Google Apps and Office 365. In addition, it has some cool features such as: social segmentation, group messaging with tracking and analytics, Gmail tracking and Twitter list import which I have found to be quite helpful in what I’m doing.

It Saves Me Time On Data Entry

I don’t know about you, but I hate typing things into the apps I use. Nimble has recognized the pain that people experience in this area and has tried to automate as much as possible. For instance, every time I add a contact into Nimble, it automatically adds all the information it finds about that individual from their social media accounts. Nimble does the Googling part for me and saves me a lot of time.

The Browser Plug-in Allows Me To Use It Where I Work

The browser plug-in for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, and Microsoft Edge allows me to take my database of contacts with me so that is accessible when I need it. I can simply hover over any name or a company name (i.e. in Twitter) on the internet, it gives me the context about my existing contacts or creates live profiles for people and companies I don’t yet have in my database. What’s great about this is that I can quickly look at a Twitter profile and determine if the person who has retweeted, liked, or commented on a post is really someone that I should be engaging with or following. If I feel that they are, I can quickly add them to my contact database via a one click process. If they’re already a contact, I can simply thank them via Nimble. What’s also great about this is that Nimble captures this information in its history, so I always know my history in communicating with that individual via social media.

This same plugin also works within Outlook or Gmail, or any other web application. Regardless if I’m working in my inbox or browsing the web, Nimble allows me to see social profile streams, conversation history, event history, and more without having to switch tabs.

Nimble Enriches My Contacts with Social and Business Data

Business intelligence is critical for success and Nimble helps individuals such as myself identify which companies to connect with by delivering company details such as industry, company size, location, employee count, revenue, and more. When profiling a company on their website or someone’s social site, it will instantly map social identities and surface these background details from social networks and third party databases.

Utilizing these quick filters and segments, I have been able to take bulk actions like sending Group Email Messages which have proven to be a real time saver. I have also used it for Stay in Touch Reminders, and marking contacts as important.

Group Messaging with a Personal Touch Makes My Outreaches More Successfull

Every message I have sent out has been received as a sincere one-on-one conversation rather than as a mass email blast. I save time with email templates and custom merge tags with the ability to reach out to up to 300 people per day.

Gmail Templates, Tracking and Analytics Give Me The Insights I Need

One feature I really like is the ability to track message opens and clicks to know exactly when my contacts have interacted with my emails, making it easier to identify those most interested in what I’m talking about. To be honest, it’s been both a blessing and a curse! Some of those who I thought would be responding to my emails very quickly have not done so. A little unnerving.In addition, I receive desktop notifications and detailed analytics on the number of times one of my contacts has opened or clicked on my message without leaving my Gmail inbox. Smart Mobile Calendar with Contact Insights Helps Me On The Go

I, also, use Nimble’s mobile apps on my iPhone. It provides me with a smart calendar with insights that are always with me, as long as I have my phone. I have the ability to receive reminders before and after meetings to make sure that I never miss an important note and all of this information, including my address book is synced directly to Nimble.

Nimble’s Twitter List Import Allows Me To Prospect Smarter

As a heavy user of Twitter, I’m a big believer in using Twitter lists to help me become better organized. What’s great about Nimble is that I have the ability to import any Twitter list on the web directly to it for lead generation and relationship management. From there, I use the power of Nimble’s Social Profile Matching to enrich your contacts with additional data points. Once new contacts are added to Nimble, I may use it to segment specific contacts to conduct outreach and organize follow-up activities.I have highlighted above just a few of the many things that Nimble has done for me. For full disclosure, I am a Nimble affiliate, but regardless, I can’t recommend the product highly enough. It’s been great in enabling me to be more productive, engaging, and focused. Without a doubt, it is my #1 TOOL for helping me to be better organized. I really hope that you try it, as I know that you’ll be equally as pleased with what it can do for you.

4 LinkedIn Tools that Will Change the Way You Think About LinkedInAuthor: Ian Cleary

If you are in B2B marketing or otherwise tasked with sourcing leads for your company, LinkedIn is one of the most powerful platforms you can use to grow your business. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that they have a presence on LinkedIn, but they’re not seeing the results they’re after. If you’re one of those people, then you probably don’t have the system and the tools in place to attract new prospects and build quality relationships. I’m going to help you change that!

Let me show you some interesting statistics that will demonstrate how effective LinkedIn can be for lead generation. A recent report from Hub Spot found that 43% of marketers have sourced a customer from LinkedIn. The opportunities are there, you just need the right way to find them.

Unlike other social networks, LinkedIn doesn’t support a lot of third party tools but there are still ways to speed up some of your key activities, such as finding the right leads, gathering customer data, building connections, and kickstarting your sales process.

We reached out to LinkedIn expert Viveka von Rosen, to ask her about the tools she uses daily to maximize the results she gets from LinkedIn.

Let’s explore the four tools Viveka recommends.

Add Tags & Notes To LinkedIn Profiles with Dux-Soup

If you’ve used LinkedIn for lead generation, you were probably using Tags and Notes to better manage relationships with your connections. Those were some really useful features that LinkedIn shut down earlier this year when they removed the Relationship Section from user profiles.

Luckily, there’s an alternative called Dux-Soup, a Chrome plug-in that keeps track of the profiles you visit and lets you tag and take notes on any LinkedIn member’s profile. You can download it for free from the Chrome web store, and there’s also a paid upgrade ($15/month).

With the free version, you can automate the process of viewing profiles (100/day), add tags and take notes, while the paid version will allow you to export data (profiles visited, profile notes, and profile lists) and configure the number of profile visits per day.

How Viveka uses Dux-Soup: “Since I actually use LinkedIn when prospecting and engaging with my network, it’s important for me to have a way to keep track of my connections on LinkedIn. Dux-Soup allows me to create tags and take as many notes as I want for free! I can export them and do other things for a small monthly fee. This has been a life saver for both me and my clients.”

Keep Track of Your LinkedIn Prospects with Nimble

Nimble is a social CRM tool that packs some really powerful features for only $25/month. It’s by far the most reasonably priced CRM system out there and it can really help organize and manage your LinkedIn lead generation efforts.

There’s also the Nimble Contacts Widget that allows you to save contact details to your Nimble account while on LinkedIn with one click. You can then tag saved profiles, make notes, or reach out to them.

Here’s how Viveka uses Nimble: “While I like to have a way to manage my connections on LinkedIn – I strongly believe in the power of a CRM tool. The one I choose is Nimble. Not just because it is super affordable and has some GREAT features, but also because it’s Chrome extension allows me to easily save my LinkedIn prospects to Nimble. From there I can also tag and take notes on their profile, put them into my deal funnel or schedule a follow up call or email.

Find Missing Contact Info with LeadGrabber Pro

LeadGrabber Pro is a great tool to help you get contact details of your LinkedIn contacts. It scrapes the web to obtain email addresses that people have shared publicly and features list-building tools that can save you a lot of time. It’s a bit on the expensive side, but if you use it to support your sales efforts, it may pay for itself many times over.

How Viveka uses LeadGrabber: LeadGrabber is my go to tool for pulling the missing information from my contact’s profiles (like email addresses and phone numbers.) It also allows me to make lists which I can then use to follow up with my key prospects off line.

Improve LinkedIn Social Selling with Sales Navigator

Sales Navigator is LinkedIn’s premium sales account and it is a great tool for prospecting. Here’s what it can do for you:

Uses a proprietary algorithm to create a list of leads tailored to your business and your product or service

Filters searches to a specific industry, location, company or title

Helps you find and save your contacts in business accounts (ABM)

Let’s you track and engage with your saved leads through updates, messages, and in mails.

This is a pricey tool, but here’s what Viveka has to say about it: “I absolutely believe it is worth the $79/month price tag. But you have to try it to believe it. Fortunately, they have a 30-day free trial.”

Those were the 4 tools that a renowned LinkedIn expert uses every day, and I’m sure that they’ll work for you and help you get the most out of LinkedIn!

Marketing technology can often be seen as a black box for a small business, and while marketing tech has been focused heavily on the enterprise, yet companies with less than 500 employees make up 99% of employers. There are many new techniques and terms to know thanks to the generous marketing community, and marketers are finding themselves consistently more present in every aspect of small businesses, changing the business itself in some cases from the inside. Even old-school marketing techniques are on the rise again. Whatever you do, it's a good idea to start simple, and one of the ways to do so is to revisit exactly where you're spending your marketing dollars, be it on software, ad spend or even content.

If you're starting out on a small budget handling a web-based business, Nimble is the perfect tool. Priced at $22 a month, Nimble features more than you would expect from an average CRM. As well as basic features (syncing with contacts, relationship management), it also includes a powerful task management system, as well as sales intelligence that automatically provides information on each one of your contacts. It also has a robust marketing automation system, such as the power to build email templates quickly and easily and track clickthroughs on the go. It integrates with most third party software packages you might otherwise be using, and is a great choice for frugal companies.

Developed and run out in Colorado by Inc 5000 company Madwire, Marketing360 is an all-in-one marketing suite combining everything a small business marketer needs, uniquely fitting both brick and mortar and online businesses. This includes paid search management (as well as click fraud protection), web design, retargeting, SEO software and CRM, along with tools that can connect actual phone calls in a store to the CRM. The same dashboard reports on (and intelligently advises you) on the success or failure of your marketing, and can let you order organic content like videos and blog content from the in-house Madwire team.

Depending on how you have built your small business' e-commerce website, you may not know if you're losing customers to bad design. You may also have a great idea to sell a new product, or want to cater to a new device. Optimizely's tools let you experiment with different design choices without shutting out every customer, or personalize pages based on someone's location. For example, Optimizely can show a clothing shopper in Alaska a different website to someone living in Florida, making sure that light shirts aren't being evangelized to someone battling below zero temperatures. It also provides one of the easiest to use recommendation engines on the web, letting you play with their algorithms to get more revenue from every customer.

The incredibly popular MailChimp's growth is owed to how incredibly easy and effective it is to use. Though it's the world's largest marketing automation platform, it's perfect for small businesses. On the surface, you can create a customized, branded email marketing campaign for any sized list of customers, with a few lines of code to your website allowing users to subscribe. The more you use it the more powerful it gets, allowing you to surprise new subscribers with specific emails and offers, target long term subscribers with specialized content, or even track those who aren't opening emails regularly to get them interested. MailChimp is unique in that it can be adapted for anyone, from content writers who want to keep their fans informed to e-commerce businesses of any size.

Depending on the type of business you are running, you may not have the need for a huge web presence. Unbounce specializes in providing (as opposed to a Squarespace or Wix) a platform-based approach to creating a business landing page, treating the web address as a destination for the customer to travel to specifically to get information. It does so by using the fast and efficient web development combined with a marketing conversion platform that can A/B test designs, swap out keywords based on what people are searching for on your website, as well as numerous conversion-focused tools to get customers signing up or purchasing. Like many web development platforms, it also automatically creates a mobile version of whatever site you've built.

CoSchedule

If you're running a content-focused business, or at least one with a strong content marketing side, CoSchedule is for you. It centers your marketing strategy around one large calendar, letting you schedule social and blog posts based on the highest engagement and traffic points in a day. It also includes the simple yet effective ReQueue system to repost your most popular content without becoming boring. It also integrates with popular platforms like Wordpress to post your content, or even with Google Documents and Evernote to import in information to post.

Where CoSchedule focuses on content and marketing, Sproutsocial adds a layer for consumer engagement and happiness and a total focus on social. The platform includes the expected social and content publishing tools, as well as analytics reports that are built to be presented to your boss, as well as sales-focused social monitoring tools that can sniff out qualified leads. Something useful for small businesses, especially those that live and die by word of mouth, is the customer care center built into what they call a "Smart Inbox." It contextualizes conversations happening with your company, and can create in a few clicks a helpdesk ticket and tasks to get your customer service team on the line with an angry Facebook or Twitter user.

Jon Ferrara,CEOof Nimble. Back in February, he introduced me to their Nimble Smart Contacts add-in to Outlook Mobile. It delivered people and company social relationship insights for free to over 40M Outlook Mobile users. Since then, he and his Nimble team have been pretty busy working with Microsoft, as one could see from his Facebook posts – having one coordination session in Seattle after the other.

Nimble will soon announce that they extended the Nimble freemium Smart Contacts for Outlook Mobile add-in to become a free plugin into Outlook Desktop Windows/Mac and Office 365. This move recognizes that the world is going cloud and mobile and that the Microsoft stack of productivity applications is the most widely used set of applications in Enterprises of all sizes. Google applications, with the notable exception of Google Mail, do not stand a chance here. The same holds true for Salesforce, which acquired the productivity tool startup Quip in August of last year, or Zoho’s Docs, or any other smaller vendor tools.

The logical next step is to …

… integrate Nimble into Outlook Desktop and Office 365. I already speculated about this in my February post:

Imagine the following: The Smart Contacts App, or rather Nimble becoming part of the Office365 fabric, working with the full Microsoft application stack, like Outlook, Skype, Team, Dynamics, Office365, LinkedIn, PowerBI and Azure. Add the fact that many smaller businesses are still working without a CRM system, but merely use their mail clients and spreedsheets – and MS Office. Continue the thought with: Salesforce, SugarCRM, SAP, Dynamics are too expensive and too ‘clumsy’, user-unfriendly. Add the idea of a deep integration into the Office Graph/LinkedIn graph, and all of the sudden there is a powerful and affordable social sales and marketing solution for Microsoft Office365 users.

Mind you, there still would be gaps on the service, especially on the marketing side, but this is a story for another day. For now I do see huge potential in this partnership.

And unsurprisingly, this is exactly what Jon and his team did over the past three months. With this new integration the Nimble Smart Contact Manager comes up within all Office 365 productivity and business applications, plus Outlook, Skype, Teams, and etc., giving users the rich contact information that Nimble gather in real time. This is fully in line with Jon’s vision of Nimble “becoming the world’s individual and teams’ simple, smart and social contact manager”.

My Take

This is Big, for both parties!

The E-Mail inbox is still the most widely used de facto contact manager. There are estimations that more than 80 percent of companies worldwide do not use any contact manager or CRM application at all.

With this step of integrating deeper into the MS fabric, Nimble comes far closer to Jon’s vision by getting access to a huge number of potential business users who need just a bit more than just e-mail and for whom Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator is too expensive and too clumsy, or just plainly not useful to people with simple needs. By staying connected to Google, Nimble rides on the two most prevalent e-mail platforms.

But what’s in it for Microsoft, you ask?

Microsoft, as the other Enterprise CRM vendors (Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SugarCRM, etc.) face increasing pressure by vendors that started off by addressing the SMB market, especially the lower end of it. Salesforce itself concentrated first on smaller companies or departmental solutions that brought them a foot in the door. With this sales approach, based upon the subscription and cloud software models, they disrupted the market – and moved on to become an enterprise player. SAP is clawing its way down with different solutions that target smaller companies than their usual clientele. Microsoft so far did the same upward move that Salesforce did. The origins of Microsoft’s business applications (Axapta and Navision) have been SMB-oriented. Now they are targeting Enterprises, of which there are only so many. SugarCRM currently moves similarly.

In brief, these vendors are vulnerable to aggressive SMB vendors like Zoho and others, which can disrupt them from below.

Microsoft needs a solution to address this vulnerability.

In comes Nimble to add simple social sales and marketing to Office365. At a reasonable price point, Nimble is likely to provide eighty to ninety percent of the functionality that small company salespeople need to grow their business. And this in a very usable way, automating a lot of the data gathering in the background. Not having to collect this data and enter it manually into the contact database adds immediate value. In comparison to learning to ride a bicycle, Nimble “will be like the training wheels” to Dynamics365 and LinkedIn Sales Navigator says Jon, “we will onboard millions of people to Microsoft Enterprise Apps and many will not need more than that”.

In summary, Microsoft gains the ability to attract a lot of smaller companies that might otherwise consider another vendor’s CRM, to their platform. With the foot in the door, Microsoft then has the possibility to easily upgrade these customers to Dynamics365 business applications.

Let’s see what the next steps are in this partnership. It has the potential to be very symbiotic. It also has the potential of Nimble becoming Microsoft’s entry solution to CRM.

Modernization for All: How Nimble is working with Microsoft to modernize the partner community

Born and bred in the cloud

Nimble is a born in the cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider. Their flagship product, a CRM sales and marketing platform, is a proven tool for transforming small to midsized customers, giving them the tools to succeed and thrive with a modernized social sales and marketing engine.

Nimble’s journey began as a part of the Google Apps ecosystem, but the company has since pivoted towards Office 365 to grow their reach. Nimble integrates tightly across Microsoft products, with leading cloud productivity solutions, and is ideally suited to customers who often find themselves hamstrung by traditional, manual sales and marketing processes.

Nimble’s decision to join the Microsoft partner community was motivated by factors beyond product integration. Nimble believes that reseller partners are uniquely positioned to benefit from the value Nimble provides and ultimately, to extend that value to their own customers. This approach enables Nimble to effectively grow while evangelizing their product.

The impact of WPC

When Dwight Foster, Vice President at Nimble, attended WPC 2016 (now Microsoft Inspire), he heard a call for modernization that resonated with Nimble’s product and approach.

“During one of the keynotes the speaker presented a slide highlighting the 4 pillars of modern sales and marketing. The message advocated for partners to modernize sales and marketing techniques and resonated with the value we provide. What we didn’t hear was a roadmap partners could follow to get there. We sent a mail during the keynote itself to let the speaker, Gavriella Schuster, know that we had the product to help partners make this a reality, and we were willing to provide that product to the entire Microsoft partner ecosystem at no charge (similar to Microsoft’s internal use rights or IUR).”– Dwight Foster, Vice President, Nimble

This offer stands for any Microsoft partner looking to modernize their sales and marketing systems using Nimble’s flagship product. Michael Spoont, the CEO of IV4 - 2016 Microsoft SMB Cloud Partner of the Year for the Northeast – also attended WPC in 2016. Foster and Spoont made a connection at the event and, knowing that IV4 would be a perfect fit for Nimble’s offering, quickly got to work on a proof of concept.

Nimble is a simple, easy to use CRM/Social Sales and Marketing platform that eases the transition for customers looking to modernize their sales and marketing tools. The platform readily integrates with Office 365 and Nimble’s team provides comprehensive training and demonstrations to help customers best realize the value of the product.

For many small and midsized customers, their attitude towards modern marketing and sales techniques is aspirational – an ideal place they know they would like to be.

The issue lies in taking this aspiration and marrying it to a powerful product and a team with the ability to guide partners through the first steps. Nimble’s mission is to help the entire Microsoft partner ecosystem take this step towards modernization, giving small and mid-sized customers the tools to compete and scale their businesses beyond the capacity afforded by traditional marketing and sales techniques.

In addition, Nimble is a great first CRM step for Microsoft partners and customers to experience the power of CRM and provides an onramp for migration to Dynamics CRM as their needs and sophistication grows.

Social selling and campaigns

Small partners commonly aspire to incorporate some form of social selling to their sales and marketing approach. Foster has spoken to many of these customers and partners and understands that, in many cases, they simply need a better tool to do the job.

“One of the challenges we see for a lot of traditional resellers is they know they want to leverage social selling but they just don’t know how best to do it. Many companies hire social media managers whose only requirement is they are young and familiar with social media and they simply don’t get any return on their investment.”– Dwight Foster, Vice President, Nimble

Social Selling leans on the massive amount of data generated by customers’ social media properties. By leveraging this information, companies can target likely customers and use actionable insights derived from social data to develop targeted marketing campaigns that speak intelligently to customers’ needs.

Nimble’s platform is built with social selling in mind. Nimble automatically enriches contacts with details from public and private databases, including social profile information and company demographics. The social section of Nimble then allows for quick segmentation and searches based on social profile information. Targeted campaigns and group messages then enable quick and simple outreach.

After WPC 2016, Nimble engaged with IV4, a mid-sized Microsoft Gold Competency Partner, to demonstrate how they can enhance their Social Selling and Marketing capabilities. Working with IV4, Nimble ran a trial of their solution with Spoont and VP of Sales Tony Harris, loading IV4’s existing customers into Nimble. The two teams then developed a webinar, set a date, created the messaging and began a campaign using Nimble’s solution. The Webinar generated 50 RSVPs which resulted in 25 attendees and 3 sales.

"One of the challenges we see for a lot of traditional resellers is they know they want to leverage social selling but they just don’t know how best to do it."

- Dwight Foster, Vice President, Nimble

Integrating social selling with Outlook and Office 365

Nimble’s platform is designed to work seamlessly with Office 365 and their add-in for Outlook is emblematic of this integrated approach. The add-in enriches contacts within Outlook with social data, automatically matching social and public details for people and companies. Insights on individual contacts include their company name, title, biography, location, work experience, education and social identities.

Nimble is offering the add-in to all Office 365/Outlook commercial users and it is available today. By integrating their social selling functionality tightly with the value already present in Office 365, Nimble succeeds in extending the value of Office 365 for their customers.

A repeatable approach to opening the door

Foster has been working with partners across the Microsoft partner ecosystem to empower resellers with a simple, modern CRM system – provided at no charge (similar to Microsoft’s IUR). This calculated risk is backstopped by Foster’s faith in the dramatic results his product can have on Microsoft partners’ sales and marketing results.

“We are offering Nimble to any Microsoft partner at no charge (similar to Microsoft’s IUR) and we will train their employees and get them up and running. We can do this because we are confident that once partners have used Nimble to modernize their sales and marketing, they will want to do the same for their customers.”– Dwight Foster, Vice President, Nimble

Ultimately, Nimble’s approach to working with Microsoft partners is founded in an idea that a rising tide will lift all boats. Nimble’s play – to provide their product up front, knowing that the value partners see will translate to their own customers – is a testament both to their faith in the product and their commitment to partnership.

“At the end of the day, all of our partners and all of their customers need to grow their businesses to succeed. As people become more connected and the quantity of information grows, users and resellers alike want a single solution to run their business. We have the solution, and we want to be the partner to make good on the promise of sales and marketing modernization for the entire partner community.” – Dwight Foster, Vice President, Nimble

"As people become more connected and the quantity of information grows, users and resellers alike want a single solution to run their business. We have the solution, and we want to be the partner to make good on the promise of sales and marketing modernization for the entire partner community."

Nimble lands $9 million Series A to simplify contact management in the cloud

Nimble CEO Jon Ferrara has been around the contacts block a few times. He was the guy who founded Goldmine, the grandaddy of contact databases. For the last several years he has been working at Nimble, a startup with the goal of managing contacts info inside Office 365 and G Suite. Today, his company announced a $9 million Series A round.

The round was led by Imagen Capital Partners with participation from Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments and Indicator Ventures along with individual angel investors including Jason Calacanis, Howard Lindzon and Don Dodge. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $12.5 million.

Nimble is attempting to automate what has essentially been a manual task of collecting contact information, whether that’s putting it in a Rolodex back in the day or typing it into your CRM like Salesforce. Ferrara says the issue has always been the manual nature of the activity, and his company wants to make that a simple process. By storing the contacts in the cloud, you can retrieve them any place, any time, on any device (assuming you have internet access).

It began by working with Google and Microsoft and their cloud app suites because he sees that as an easy way to find information where people are working, whether that’s an email or other document. The company plans to offer a generic browser plug-in soon that will allow users to capture this information wherever they happen to be in the work process.

Nimble window built into Office 365.

Last month, Nimble released a version that works inside of Outlook for iOS. While you could argue that Outlook already has a contact database of sorts, Nimble gives you much richer and more detailed information than most people could compile on their own without a lot of effort.

The product begins by extracting any information it can find about the person. It may pull the name and email address, it then checks for online social media activity and checks the name and email against a number of private databases (which Ferrara didn’t name). Using all of this information, the company builds a profile with a bunch of data about the individual — and it does this all automatically. Users can augment this information by adding tasks, notes, deals, events and so forth. What’s more it can track all of the interactions you make inside of Nimble with a contact, so you have a history all in one place.

While none of this is revolutionary, the fact it tracks a range of information in an automated fashion could prove very useful for salespeople (or any knowledge worker who needs to keep track of a large list of individuals in a database in this fashion.)

The company launched in 2009 with the pay version of the current tool launching in 2013. Nimble has 25 employees, but it’s a good bet it will be adding to that number with the new investment in pocket.

30+ Top Tools for the Self-Employed Entrepreneur

03/20/2017 03:11 pm ET

When you’re a self-employed entrepreneur, you wear many hats. In some cases, you wear ALL of the hats. In my case, I’m wearing a KC Royals ballcap right now, while in Tokyo, representing Kansas City. Why? Because I have no boss and I wear what I want! But I digress.

When you are self-employed, you are responsible for everything within your business.

It’s no surprise the number of people in the gig economy is exponentially growing. According to Intuit’s latest study, Dispatches From the New Economy: The On-Demand Workforce, the number of people working on-demand jobs will grow from 3.0 million Americans to 7.7 million in 2020, and will reach a whopping 9.2 million by 2021.

Being self-employed can be a challenge.

I reached out to several self-employed entrepreneurs to gauge which tools they use to help them manage their small business, venture, or career.

I asked Joel Comm, a live video expert and 12-time NY Times best selling author of the upcoming book, “Self-Employed”, his thoughts on being Self-Employed and he said, “As a perpetually (and unavoidably) self-employed businessman, I can’t imagine operating without the freedom to manage my own schedule. Being self-employed means I live my life on my terms!”

Personally, I’ve been self-employed a few different times, and I am currently the cofounder of a digital agency,CCP.Digital, based out of Kansas City. Even though, we have a growing team of marketing & growth hackers, I still view myself as self-employed.

FILE MANAGEMENT

When it comes to the day-to-day business/admin functions, one of the tools mentioned overwhelmingly wasGoogle GSuite. HavingGoogle Drive, with Docs, Spreadsheets, Forms, Presentations and of course, using Google to power your company business email, this tool is a no-brainer.Dropbox andBox are also great solutions.

CUSTOMER MANAGEMENT

Nimble is a social customer relationship management platform that allows you to keep track of all of your contacts social activity to build relationships with them.

Nimble has an amazing Chrome extension that allows you to roll over anyone’s name and add them to your Nimble database. You can then connect with them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. It’s a solid tool to have in your arsenal.

ORGANIZATIONAL TOOLS

A great productivity tool for the self-employed isEvernote. Evernote has stand alone native apps for PC, Mac, Android, and iOS. They work great and allow you to keep notes on virtually anything. I personally use it to keep track of my to-do tasks.

And it was instrumental in planning and research for my book,Digital Sense, the Common Sense approach to Social Business Strategy, Marketing Technologies, and Customer Experience.

Without Evernote and Google Docs, I would have never been able to write a book.

FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS

One of the companies at the forefront of the self-employed movement isIntuit, the maker of QuickBooks. Intuit has a specific version called QuickBooks Self-Employed that can be a valuable tool in your arsenal. From automatic mileage tracking, to easily separating business and personal expenses and along with invoicing and accounting features, in many cases, it is the master control for the financial health of your business.

Every single entrepreneur that I asked mentioned QuickBooks – even a pro golfer! Yep, you read that right. Intuit was a sponsor of the recent AT&T Pro-Am and I had the chance to hang out a bit with pro golfer Matt Jones who mentioned, “I’m a self-employed golfer, and I use Quickbooks to track all of my expenses.”

PROJECT MANAGEMENT

Next on the list isTrello,Asana, and Basecamp. These are project management tools to help you stay organized and on task. As mentioned, I use Evernote for personal to-dos, but for my agency, we useBasecamp 3, which helps keep everyone on the same page with each project that we are working on.

SOCIAL MEDIA DASHBOARD

For social sharing and management of your social media, there are many tools. Hootsuite andSproutSocial are great tools for SMBs and the self-employed, who are responsible for sharing news about your business on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

WEBSITE TOOLS

If your business is digitally savvy, you have a website. Make sure it definitely hasGoogle Analytics on it at a minimum. With GA, you’re able to track your web traffic, see which pages are driving traffic, your conversions, the bounce rate of your pages, and gain many other valuable insights.

You would also be wise to have theFacebook custom audience pixel on your site, as well. If you are driving people to your website with social media, you will definitely want to retarget them and market to them later on.

TIME TRACKING

If you are working on multiple projects and need to bill certain clients for various amounts of time, you may need something likeToggl. It helps you manage all of your daily time.

Also, if you are wanting to be more productive overall, consider using apomodoro timer to keep you on task!

CALENDAR & MEETING SCHEDULING

Scheduling meetings can sometimes be a CHORE! 17 emails back and forth until a time is decided on is a blatant waste of time. Consider using a tool likeCalendly orGigabook to help you schedule your meetings more effectively.

I couldn’t manage my business without one of these tools.

CREDIT CARD READERS

Changes are, if you are self-employed, you will need a way to take credit cards with your mobile device.Square andPaypal are perfect for those tasks. Unless you have an iPhone 7, and you no longer have the headphone jack to plug in the dongle.

Thanks Apple!

BUSINESS TRAVEL

If you are a road warrior, then it is imperative that you have some great travel apps to help you navigate. I likeSkiplagged to find the best priced flights.Hotel Tonight,AirBNB for lodging. FlightTrack Pro andTripit are also good choices.

OUTSOURCED TALENT

As a self-employed person, you are typically an army of one. What do you do when you need to ramp up or need some bench strength to help get you over the hump? Personally, I use virtual assistants and outsourced talent. There is a ton of services out there, you just need to look in the right places. Upwork is a community of over 12m freelancers available to help you. Fiverr is a great place to get cheap tasks done. Growgig is another site for small recurring marketing tasks for your company.

And if you are looking to hire talent to help full-time, consider using a service like Staff Virtual, they have a ton of qualified full-time people in the Philippines, who can help your business while you are sleeping at night. I’ve used them extensively in my business, as they all speak great english, and they are all college educated.

Nimble CRM’s New Add-In for Outlook on iOS Will Deliver Unique Social Relationship InsightsBy Sudipto Ghosh

MarTech companies are increasingly focusing on making the enterprise collaboration tools more user-friendly. As email marketing gets more personalized and mobile-centric, marketers chose from a wide range of third-party apps for task management. Outlook, easily the most preferred email app for iOS, now gets more integration in MarTech than other third-party apps. One of the latest platforms to offer Outlook for iOS is Nimble, the leading CRM solutions provider for social sales and marketing.

Nimble is a pioneer in SaaS-based CRM solutions for web and social media. By offering seamless integration with a new add-in for Outlook for iOS, Nimble CRM users will receive instant social business insights on people and companies. The new Nimble Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook on iOS will allow Outlook users to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact – directly from their email messages.

“We’re all over-connected and over-communicated by too many email messages,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.

“By putting Nimble’s powerful social contact insights right into Outlook, we will help millions of business users to no longer flying blind with relationships and engagement.”

MarTech companies are increasingly focusing on making the enterprise collaboration tools more user-friendly. As email marketing gets more personalized and mobile-centric, marketers chose from a wide range of third-party apps for task management. Outlook, easily the most preferred email app for iOS, now gets more integration in MarTech than other third-party apps. One of the latest platforms to offer Outlook for iOS is Nimble, the leading CRM solutions provider for social sales and marketing.

Nimble is a pioneer in SaaS-based CRM solutions for web and social media. By offering seamless integration with a new add-in for Outlook for iOS, Nimble CRM users will receive instant social business insights on people and companies. The new Nimble Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook on iOS will allow Outlook users to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact – directly from their email messages.

“By putting Nimble’s powerful social contact insights right into Outlook, we will help millions of business users to no longer flying blind with relationships and engagement.”

“We’re all over-connected and over-communicated by too many email messages,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.

UNIQUE ASPECTS OF NIMBLE SMART CONTACTS

Nimble’s new add-ins for Outlook on iOS rolled out new features –

Automatic matching of social and public details of customers and B2B users

Instant business and social insights for people and companies in Outlook Mobile

company insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year Founded, keywords, company type, revenue, CEO name, address and phone

People insights like person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities

Social contact profile matching to create rich contact details

Social company profile matching to create rich company details

MarTech companies are increasingly focusing on making the enterprise collaboration tools more user-friendly. As email marketing gets more personalized and mobile-centric, marketers chose from a wide range of third-party apps for task management. Outlook, easily the most preferred email app for iOS, now gets more integration in MarTech than other third-party apps. One of the latest platforms to offer Outlook for iOS is Nimble, the leading CRM solutions provider for social sales and marketing.

Nimble is a pioneer in SaaS-based CRM solutions for web and social media. By offering seamless integration with a new add-in for Outlook for iOS, Nimble CRM users will receive instant social business insights on people and companies. The new Nimble Smart Contacts add-in for Outlook on iOS will allow Outlook users to benefit from Nimble’s full and detailed view of any contact – directly from their email messages.

“We’re all over-connected and over-communicated by too many email messages,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.

“By putting Nimble’s powerful social contact insights right into Outlook, we will help millions of business users to no longer flying blind with relationships and engagement.”

UNIQUE ASPECTS OF NIMBLE SMART CONTACTS

Nimble’s new add-ins for Outlook on iOS rolled out new features –

Automatic matching of social and public details of customers and B2B users

Instant business and social insights for people and companies in Outlook Mobile

company insights including biography, industry, number of employees, year Founded, keywords, company type, revenue, CEO name, address and phone

People insights like person’s name, company name, title, biography, location, keywords, work experience, education, social identities

Social contact profile matching to create rich contact details

Social company profile matching to create rich company details

via Nimble CRM

“The biggest cause of communication failure is the lack of knowledge of who someone is or what their business is about,” says Ferrara.

Nimble CRM is one of the simplest SaaS-based marketing solutions for growing businesses. By offering the latest add-in features on a 14-day free trial, Nimble has extended its Social CRM platform across G Suite, Chrome, Outlook, Safari, Hootsuite, iOS and Android. Business accounts can add Nimble’s new add-in for Outlook on iOS at $25 per month.

“Nimble is a welcome addition to the Office ecosystem as they clearly have an understanding of the needs of business users in a social, global world,” said Rob Howard, Director, Office Product Marketing at Microsoft Corp. “Providing contextual information about contacts helps business relationships flourish, so connecting that capability through the new Nimble add-in for Outlook on iOS is a logical step.”

The way enterprises do business in 2017 has changed drastically compared to the scenario two years ago. Sales teams need powerful, real-time insights to make rapid decisions — much of it attributed to social media and mobile engagements. By adding CRM features to Outlook on iOS, marketers can create enriching customer experience through deeper engagement. Add-ins focusing on customer experience, like the one between Nimble and Outlook on iOS, also offer seamless collaboration with transformative experiences to every CRM user. Sales CRM integrated with social features provide a “leaping board” for simple customer management across mobile and web.

What to Do Now That We are Losing LinkedIn’s CRM Features

(Free Nimble Training Below)By Viveka von Rosen

You have probably heard rumors about all the changes being made to LinkedIn in the next few months. (If not, read this article). One of the biggest changes is that we are losing the Advanced search as well as saved searches, tagging, and note-taking.

All CRM aspects of the FREE LinkedIn service are going away. Which is a HUGE bummer for people who have been actively prospecting using these tools with their free LinkedIn accounts. The solution within LinkedIn is to upgrade to Sales Navigator (which I personally love,) but at $79 a month, that is going to be outside of most people’s wheelhouse!

Another solution is to use the Chrome Extension Dux-Soup which has both free and paid version and works to create Tags and Notes for your prospects on LinkedIn (when using Chrome.)

But I think the best low-cost solution is to invest in Nimble at $25 a month. Nimble is not just a LinkedIn tool, but a whole Social CRM solution. Here is a training we did on January 19th - It's a little over an hour - so set aside some time!

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noZNsq7YoJw[/embed]

Specifically, the webinar shows you:

How to Build a Golden “Rolodex” in the Cloud

Key Techniques to Identify People That Matter

How to Outreach at Scale in a Relevant and Effective Way

How to Take Your Contacts with You, Everywhere You Work

How to Put a System in Place For Effective Relationship Nurturing

I also created a free checklist for those of you who want to use Nimble. You can access the checklist by clicking HERE

Why Use Nimble?

· Nimble automatically builds your CRM by unifying all your conversations and interactions in one place – and gives you the context of the relationship and communications with them

· Nimble allows you to segment your database and build smart segments based on enriched background details, making it easy to target the right prospects

· Send personalized messages from your own email identity to any of your contacts. Every outreach appears as a sincere one-to-one conversation rather than a mass email blast. Measure your success with detailed open and click tracking reports.

· Track message opens and clicks to know exactly when your contacts interact with your outreach, making it easier to follow up with your hottest prospects. Receive desktop notifications and details analytics to see the number of times a contact has opened or clicked on your message without leaving your Gmail inbox.

· Import any Twitter list directly to Nimble with our Nimble Smart Contacts App. Then use the power of Nimble’s Social Profile Matching to enrich your contacts with additional data points. Segment contacts based on these data points to conduct your outreach.

· Nimble’s Mobile apps for iPhone and Android give you a smart calendar with insights with you, anywhere you work. Get reminders before and after meetings to make sure you never miss an important note and sync your phonebook directly to Nimble.

· Nimble delivers simple CRM to Google Apps and Office 365 by unifying contacts, email, calendar and social history into a powerful contact manager enabling everyone in your company to work as a team. The Nimble Smart Contacts App for Chrome, Safari and Firefox delivers business insights on people and companies you work with to help you connect intelligently and take action inside Office 365, Google Apps and everywhere else you work.

· Nimble gives you insights – keeping contact info and engagement up to date and storing history of communications

· Nimble will automatically tag people according to their areas of Influence

· You can also create custom fields of data to manually input contact info

· Nimble also has a new Import Wizard that allows you to upload any CSV file you might have (Like LinkedIn’s Connections – including TAGS!)

CRM Plus Social Plus Business Information Is A Winning Combination: Nimble Upgrades

As I travel cross the country, I’m amazed at the number of business owners who are still relatively new to the power of using content and “social media” to engage with their customers. Part of this rise is fostered and enabled by CRM companies integrating social dynamics into their platform.

Today Nimble announces a slew of new and updated integrations (Office 366 and Google Apps) into its software. In addition it’s enriching it’s social connections and business contact information.

You can use Nimble to not only keep in touch with your customers and other contacts but also build and save profiles based on a variety of business information – such as industry size and location.

The power of CRM is a) everyone in your company can get the same snapshot of one customer b) everyone on your team can better collaborate about customers (or others) c) you can glean public insights on each contact in your database d) you can segment customers and better market to them.

How Do I Know You?

Dunbar's number proposes that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. Well I don't know about stable... but I'd say I interact with far more than 150 people every day. With interactions via email, chat, social networks, blogs, web sites, discussion forums, customer communities and a dozen other sources, it's a real challenge for me to keep up with who all these people are.

That's the problem Nimble is trying to solve. Here's a quick look at some of what Nimble can do.

While several products are claiming to help you know who people are, Nimble is the first I've seen that instantly pulls in data from multiple sources, giving you a very complete overview. My first reaction was a mixture of awe and fear. Of course Nimble is only aggregating data that is publicly available, but by doing so it really reveals a lot about the digital footprints we're all leaving out there.

Yammer is a private social network that allows you to connect your workforce, take your internal communications to a new level and introduce new ways of working. You’ll be able to easily find and switch between your project groups and keep up with announcements, conversations and private messages. The app lets you continue participating from wherever you are without missing a beat.

You can also invite external project members such as customers and vendors into Yammer conversations so they can provide input and access the information they need.

Dating back as it does to the Nineties, customer relationship management is the Daddy of social networking. The Nimble app, which works in conjunction with the Desktop application, gives you intelligent insights about your contacts, meaning you’ll be better prepared for meetings and conversations.

Jon Ferrara, Nimble’s founder, explains: “The main reason why CRM systems fail is lack of use. People don't like to go to their CRM to look people up, log notes, and so on. Nimble solves this problem by automatically updating itself. It builds the database for you by gathering existing contact and company records and linking them with your team's emails, calendar events and social interactions.”

LinkedIn, says Mark Saxby, director of social media agency Status Social, is all about building relationships and getting past the gatekeepers to the decision makers, which makes it a very powerful business-to-business tool. “If you are aiming your product or services at other businesses, it is by far the strongest network,” he says. “People buy from people, so it’s the personal profiles on LinkedIn that are so vital.”

However, he advises that to make it really effective you need to be posting at least once, and preferably two or three times a day. “That’s where the app comes in so useful, because it lets you keep your contacts informed about what you’re doing wherever you are and, as it also lets you take photos to post directly on your LinkedIn page, you can have a great image alongside your message.”

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that will help you manage your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can schedule messages, engage your audiences and measure your return on investment.

The app integrates seamlessly with the Hootsuite dashboard, letting you leave the office and take your social media management on the road, saving time as you work from anywhere with the powerful tools that you’re familiar with. Hootsuite Pro is specially aimed at SMEs, and you can try it free for 30 days before you buy.

Zoho Connect is an enterprise social network that connects people, ideas and information, allowing you to post messages, add comments, share files and hold discussions, all in real time.

There is also a custom app builder that has an easy drag-and-drop interface, meaning anybody in the organisation can build apps, regardless of their level of technical expertise. The mobile app, which works as an extension of the desktop application, is built to help you take your business along wherever you go.

Nimble Named a 2015 Hot Vendor in Social Selling By Aragon Research

SANTA MONICA, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

July 29, 2015–Nimble, the Simply Smarter Social Selling CRM, was named a 2015 Hot Vendor in Social Selling by Aragon Research, a technology-focused research and advisory firm committed to providing thought leading strategic research and trusted advisory services.

Aragon Research has released their top 2015 Hot Vendor in Social Selling. Nimble was one of three Hot Vendors in Social Selling highlighted in the report. Each year, Aragon Research selects Hot Vendors across multiple markets that are doing something truly new or different. They may have new technology that expands capabilities, a new strategy that opens up markets, or just a new way of doing business that makes them worth evaluating.

“Connecting and engaging with prospects in today’s environment is more challenging than ever due in part to the overload of calls and emails,” said Jim Lundy, CEO and lead analyst at Aragon Research. Lundy continued, “Business Leaders are continually on the hunt for new innovative products and services to help their teams engage customers and our 2015 Hot Vendors in Social Selling are making an impact and a difference in their respective markets.”

“The Aragon Research Hot Vendor in Social Selling recognition is a strong validation of the innovation and value Nimble provides its customers,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “We believe that you shouldn’t have to work for your CRM so we built the first relationship manager that works for you, everywhere you work. We are grateful that Nimble continues to be recognized for its pioneering leadership in relationship management by a majority of analysts and review sites, including this rating by Aragon Research.”

The Simply Smarter Social Selling CRM that Works for You, Everywhere You Work

Nimble invented intelligence relationship management by blending traditional CRM with social sales relationship insights to enable business professionals to effectively engage social customers. It can be used as a company’s social CRM or the Nimble Smart Contacts App can add tremendous value to existing CRM, sales and marketing products.

About Nimble, Inc. – Nimble has reimagined customer relationship management by introducing the world’s first intelligent relationship platform that takes the work out of CRM. It automatically pulls contact profiles, email conversations, and social signals into one simple place so you can effectively engage them everywhere you work.

Nimble combines the power of traditional CRM, smart relationship management, and social media into a powerful web-based social selling solution.

About Aragon Research – a technology focused research and advisory firm committed to providing thought leading strategic research and trusted advisory services. Aragon Research does not endorse vendors, or their products or services that are referenced in its research publications and does not advise users to select those vendors that are rated the highest. Aragon Research publications consist of the opinions of Aragon Research and Advisory Services organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Aragon Research provides its research publications and the information contained in them “AS IS,” without warranty of any kind.

These days it seems like there's a better way to do almost anything. Whether you're sharing documents and pictures, managing email, or even updating your Facebook and Twitter accounts, chances are there's a way you could do it more efficiently. This capability, of course, is largely due to technology -- specifically, on your mobile phone or tablet.

Architects, for instance, may have once had to send a special courier to deliver blueprints across town. Now they make deliveries of large documents on their phone while lying in bed at night. For small-business owners, these advances are not just a matter of convenience, but a way to save money, market their services, and retain customers.

So what are their favorite tech tools in 2015?

The team at SurePayroll, a small-business payroll provider, reached out to me via Twitter to share that they had recently surveyed over 350 small-business owners nationwide to find out which tools they use for email marketing, cloud storage, social media, productivity, and more.

The survey found that 78% of small-business owners have had to make changes to their businesses to account for a more online, technology-based marketplace. That tells you just how pervasive tech has become in our lives. Everything is in the cloud, man. So check out the following rankings by category of small-business owners' favorite tech tools:

Organization and productivity apps:

Google Drive lets you store and access your files anywhere--on the web, on your hard drive, or on the go.

Evernote is a suite of software and services that allow users to capture, organize, and find information across multiple platforms.

Tripit is a trip planner that enables users to create a master travel itinerary and provide them with online and mobile access.

ScribbleLive is the leading content marketing platform. It grows your upper funnel by combining big data insights with workflow technology.

There are many valuable tools out there to help the small-business entrepreneur be better organized and more productive overall. Do you have a favorite tool that was missed? List it below in our comments.

9 Sales Apps to Help Small Businesses Sell Better

Nothing describes selling today better than that old standby phrase, “Knowledge is power.”

That’s because the best way for small businesses to sell better is to get to know their prospects and customers better.

It’s almost like you need to know what those prospects and customers want and when they want it before they do. You don’t need to be psychic to do this, however. All you have to do is mine your customer and prospect data, both historical and real-time.

Unfortunately, thanks to the sheer number of data points including emails, social media updates, transactions and hundreds of other behavioral touch points, just managing your customer data — let alone leveraging it — can quickly become an overwhelming task.

Luckily, there are many fine solutions available to help you navigate and leverage this deluge of customer data successfully. We’ve gathered a list of some of the best sales apps below so get your sales hat on and take a look.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Solutions

Since we’re talking about customer and prospect data here, it’s no surprise that we’re focusing on CRM solutions first because, well, that’s where most of the data you’ve collected on your customers and prospects lives.

This is a huge category so we’ve narrowed our list down to the two types of CRM solutions that help small businesses sell better: Sales-Focused CRMs and Social CRMs.

Sales-Focused Customer Relationship Management Systems

These CRM solutions were designed around the sales process. Combining basic CRM features with selling know-how, they’ll help you streamline your sales pipeline by enabling you to focus on the customers and prospects that are most likely to buy right now.

Note: all of the solutions in this section offer integration with many of the popular tools and solutions in use today. So even if you don’t need a new CRM, you can take advantage of the sales process features and functionality found within these solutions.

In addition, each solution offers mobile sales apps so you can use them on the go.

Pipedrive

Every feature aims to help you stay on top of your sales process — from the sales pipeline view shown below, to sales timelines that tell you which deals to focus on that month. It includes robust sales reporting and easy integration with your email system via a blind BCC.

PipelineDeals

PipelineDeals is a robust CRM that offers a lot under the hood including sales automation, team collaboration and lots of reporting. One of their handier features is an API that enables you to collect leads from your website in real-time.

Pipeliner

Pipeliner focuses on the sales process end-to-end from high-level sales stages to the low-level sales activities required to advance to the next stage.

Pipeliner differs from the other two solutions in this section because it offers you the ability to work offline on both your desktop/laptop computer as well as your mobile devices. Once you reconnect, your data is synched up to the cloud.

Social Customer Relationship Management Systems

While the two solutions listed below do offer tools to help small businesses sell better, their strong, often automatic (goodbye data entry!), customer data gathering capabilities are what earned them a spot on our list.

The area where both tools shine most is in the way they consolidate customer information from many sources into one spot. We’re talking email and social media as well as the more traditional CRM capability to capture your notes and reminders for each contact.

After all, how can you leverage data from your prospects and customers if you can’t collect it?

Nimble

Nimble automatically collects every one of your prospect’s emails and social media updates (from many, many platforms) in one spot and then, using its own rules engine, it learns what’s important to you so you can cut through the noise and get right to the heart of what your prospects and customers are looking for.

Once you discover an opportunity it can be managed using the deals dashboard:

Batchbook

Batchbook collects both email and tweets from your prospects to give you a big picture view of what’s on their mind. When it comes to selling, they offer a sales pipeline view that helps you manage potential deals:

Sales and Marketing Automation Solutions

Once you’ve collected and mined the data from your customers, the next logical step is to act on what you’ve discovered.

Like data collection, this can become a very time-consuming task that quickly eats away at your schedule. However, taking action is required to close sales so how can you act while also protecting your precious time?

You guessed it — automation. The apps listed below will help you automate many parts of your sales process based on triggers that are driven by the data mined from your customer relationship management system. In fact, they can even serve as a CRM, too.

The only downside to these solutions is their price — they’ll cost you more than the solutions we’ve covered so far. However, when it comes to automating your sales process, paying a bit more is often worth the expense.

Infusionsoft

Standout features include the intuitive drag-and-drop campaign system for automating tasks based on many types of triggers, both on site and off. Also, there’s the ability to score your leads based on their behavior — the higher the score, the stronger the lead.

HubSpot

Another all-in-one sales and marketing solution, HubSpot‘s strength is inbound marketing using content. Like Infusionsoft, it offers robust automation and with its free HubSpot CRM, it offers leads management as well.

HubSpot differs from Infusionsoft in that it can host many of your website’s pages. This leads to some super useful features such as alerts that trigger based on a lead’s action on your site:

Contactually

Contactually focuses on keeping the relationships with your contacts alive. Offering automation, sales process management and the usual bevy of reports, the solution is smaller in scale than the previous two yet more focused for that.

Connecting It All

Zapier

Sometimes you can’t find everything you need in one app or solution. That’s whereZapier comes in. Using “Zaps” you can automate the connections between solutions. For example, the Zap below will add a new Twitter follower to Pipedrive’s “New Activity” stream:

Conclusion

While the sales apps above may not show you the future, they will help you discover which prospects and customers you should focus your sales efforts on first, and when.

That knowledge is truly the key to helping your small business sell better.

5 Top SMB Social Network Apps

Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are not only fun but they have transformed the business landscape and brought SMEs the sort of opportunities they could only have dreamed of a decade ago.

For SMBs social network apps geared specifically towards enterprise are now equally important. We share the five essential social network apps, every SMB needs to know about.

01. Yammer

Yammer is a private social network that allows you to connect your workforce, take your internal communications to a new level and introduce new ways of working. You’ll be able to easily find and switch between your project groups and keep up with announcements, conversations and private messages. The app lets you continue participating from wherever you are without missing a beat.

You can also invite external project members such as customers and vendors into Yammer conversations so they can provide input and access the information they need.

02. Nimble

Dating back as it does to the Nineties, customer relationship management is the Daddy of social networking. The Nimble app, which works in conjunction with the Desktop application, gives you intelligent insights about your contacts, meaning you’ll be better prepared for meetings and conversations.

Jon Ferrara, Nimble’s founder, explains: “The main reason why CRM systems fail is lack of use. People don't like to go to their CRM to look people up, log notes, and so on. Nimble solves this problem by automatically updating itself. It builds the database for you by gathering existing contact and company records and linking them with your team's emails, calendar events and social interactions.”

03. LinkedIn

LinkedIn, says Mark Saxby, director of social media agency Status Social, is all about building relationships and getting past the gatekeepers to the decision makers, which makes it a very powerful business-to-business tool. “If you are aiming your product or services at other businesses, it is by far the strongest network,” he says. “People buy from people, so it’s the personal profiles on LinkedIn that are so vital.”

However, he advises that to make it really effective you need to be posting at least once, and preferably two or three times a day. “That’s where the app comes in so useful, because it lets you keep your contacts informed about what you’re doing wherever you are and, as it also lets you take photos to post directly on your LinkedIn page, you can have a great image alongside your message.”

04. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool that will help you manage your social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can schedule messages, engage your audiences and measure your return on investment.

The app integrates seamlessly with the Hootsuite dashboard, letting you leave the office and take your social media management on the road, saving time as you work from anywhere with the powerful tools that you’re familiar with. Hootsuite Pro is specially aimed at SMEs, and you can try it free for 30 days before you buy.

05. Zoho Connect

Zoho Connect is an enterprise social network that connects people, ideas and information, allowing you to post messages, add comments, share files and hold discussions, all in real time.

There is also a custom app builder that has an easy drag-and-drop interface, meaning anybody in the organisation can build apps, regardless of their level of technical expertise. The mobile app, which works as an extension of the desktop application, is built to help you take your business along wherever you go.

CHICAGO, May 5, 2015 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- The updated Grid℠ report for CRM software, published today by business software review siteG2 Crowd, ranks 35 products to help purchasers in their selections.

The Spring 2015 report is based on data from more than 2,500 reviews written by business and marketing professionals.

The Grid℠ was created from G2 Crowd's software review platform, which compiles customer satisfaction as reported by users, along with vendor market presence as determined from public and social data, to rank products.

The Spring 2015 report also includes Grids℠ representing reviewer company size segments: Small Business (50 or fewer employees), Mid-Market (51 to 1,000 employees) and Enterprise (1,001+ employees).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems enable companies to track and manage all customer interactions across the customer lifecycle from lead to order to support in one master system of record. CRM software suites typically provide sales force automation (SFA), marketing automation features, customer support features and a unifying database to manage customer data and customer-facing applications.

The Grid℠ for CRM (Mid-Market) featured Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Zoho CRM as Leaders. Salesnet, PipelineDeals, Nimble CRM, Prophet CRM and Workbooks.com were named High Performers for this segment.

The Grid℠ for CRM (Enterprise) featured Salesforce CRM as the only Leader. Nimble CRM, PipelineDeals, Workbooks.com and Prophet were named High Performers for this segment.

Across all CRM systems, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 81%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use. Products appearing on the CRM Grid℠ for the first time were Prophet CRM, Membrain, Relenta CRM, Really Simple Systems, GreenRope, Apptivo, vtiger, and Insightly.

In addition, the average reported implementation time across all CRM products was 2.2 months, and the average payback period in which users received a positive ROI was eight months.

"Salesforce [CRM] allows for all team members to collaborate and track clients in one clean arena. The biggest advantage is the ability to start tracking prospects and leads and turn them into closed business. We are able to watch the sales cycle from beginning to end."

- Maxx Krueger, Business Development & Analytics at Infegy

"[Microsoft Dynamics CRM is] very user friendly. You don't have to be a techie to figure out how to customize and tailor the solution to your specific needs and requirements. For example, it's mainly a CRM geared toward sales professionals. I was able to fully customize the solution to fit our real estate and acquisition needs."

Across all CRM systems, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 81%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use. Products appearing on the CRM Grid℠ for the first time were Prophet CRM, Membrain, Relenta CRM, Really Simple Systems, GreenRope, Apptivo, vtiger, and Insightly.

In addition, the average reported implementation time across all CRM products was 2.2 months, and the average payback period in which users received a positive ROI was eight months.

"Salesforce [CRM] allows for all team members to collaborate and track clients in one clean arena. The biggest advantage is the ability to start tracking prospects and leads and turn them into closed business. We are able to watch the sales cycle from beginning to end."

- Maxx Krueger, Business Development & Analytics at Infegy

"[Microsoft Dynamics CRM is] very user friendly. You don't have to be a techie to figure out how to customize and tailor the solution to your specific needs and requirements. For example, it's mainly a CRM geared toward sales professionals. I was able to fully customize the solution to fit our real estate and acquisition needs."

- Jasmine Polson, Associate at Avison Young Commercial Real Estate

"All companies need people[,] but what small companies...need is the ability to connect efficiently, [and] establish information with a...CRM that is intuitive and reliable. Zoho works! You can build relationships, set tasks, events and follow ups easily...It's great."

- Paula Sharratt, Business Development at Central High Rise

[Nimble CRM] is easy to set up. I uploaded [more than 3,500] contacts and 30 deals on day one and was completely up and running [two] days later. The tool is easy to navigate and quickly link deals to contacts and [vice] versa.

- Luke Wissmann, VP of Sales and Business Development at OceanGate

Of the more than 180 software vendors listed in G2 Crowd's CRM category, the 35 ranked products each received 10 or more reviews to qualify for inclusion on the Grid℠.

Satisfaction rankings are generated from the user reviews, and market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact. Based on a combination of these scores, each software solution is categorized as a Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche.

Premium research access can be purchased at G2Crowd.com/categories/crm. These offer the original data for filtering and weighting, as well as individual profiles of platforms with at least 20 helpful positive and negative CRM platform reviews, detailed company information, user satisfaction ratings, feature scores and customer metrics. Future refreshes of the Grid℠ will provide updated rankings based on the latest reviews and social data.

Be sure to check out the new Grid℠ for the best CRM software and subscribe to the premium research.

About G2 Crowd, Inc.

G2 Crowd, the world's leading business software review platform, leverages its roughly 30,000 user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Technology buyers, investors, and analysts use the site to compare and select the best software based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Co-founded by the founder and former executives from SaaS leader BigMachines and backed by more than $4.5 million in capital, G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to business technology research. For more information, go to G2Crowd.com.

Nimble Partners with Owler to Build a Simply Smarter CRM

SAN MATEO, Calif. & SANTA MONICA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--

Owler and Nimble are pleased to announce a strategic partnership unifying two emerging forces in competitive and business intelligence. Both organizations strive to bring users increasingly relevant, targeted and actionable business information.

In this new partnership, content from Owler’s company profiles (powered by Owler’s Competitive Graph) will enrich the depth and breadth of the company insights delivered in theNimble Smart Contacts App browser Plugin.

Owler’s database of over 15 million company profiles provides Nimble users with employee, revenue, CEO and industry information. The Owler integration enables Nimble users to access a robust set of company information everywhere they work including social networks, other sales and marketing apps and even on any company website.

Owler’s CEO, Jim Fowler, believes the Competitive Graph will have a massive impact on CRM systems and the business world. “Data drives businesses,” says Fowler. “Having the most accurate competitive data is a requirement for success.”

“Access to immediate relevant and actionable data is key to effective engagement in business,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble. “Our Nimble Smart Contacts App delivers Live Contact Profiles on anyone anywhere and now we can deliver Live Company Profiles with the integration of Owler company profiles.”

We use Nimble to identify and engage people and companies that can help us grow our business,” said Chris Herbert, CMO/Co-founder of Mi6 Agency. “The addition of Owler company profiles in Nimble helps us narrow our focus on the right customer at the right time.”

ABOUT NIMBLE – Nimble has pioneered simply smarter social relationship management for individuals and teams to intelligently nurture relationships across email and social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. It can be used as a company’s CRM or to add social sales intelligence to existing sales and marketing products with the Nimble Smart Contacts App. Nimble was founded by Jon Ferrara, the co-founder of GoldMine and pioneer of SFA, CRM, Relationship Management and Marketing Automation. For more information, visitwww.nimble.com. Nimble can be found on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,Vimeo and Instagram.

ABOUT OWLER - Owler is a free competitive intelligence service that provides its members real-time insights into the changes at their competitors, clients, and partners with a series of customized and automated reports. Owler was started by serial entrepreneur and crowdsourcing pioneer Jim Fowler. Jim previously founded Jigsaw, which was sold to Salesforce in 2010 and was considered one of the most successful exits that year at $175 million. Owler formally launched its platform June 25th, 2014. Owler is backed by Norwest Venture Partners and Trinity Ventures.

Everything That Happens After a Deal Is Made on 'Shark Tank,' According to Mark Cuban

The handshake deal that happens on the show isn't the end of the story.

BY RICHARD FELONI Business Insider

CREDIT: Getty Images

For the past seven seasons, hundreds of entrepreneurs have appeared on the Shark Tank set in hopes of scoring a deal with a celebrity investor like Mark Cuban.

Some of these businesses, like horror-entertainment company Ten Thirty One Productions, go on to approach or exceed $1 million in annual profits within just a couple years of appearing on the show.

Cuban explained to Business Insider why getting a Shark like him can be so valuable to a company, and what the process following a successful pitch on the show looks like.

First of all, the handshake deal that happens on the show isn't anything binding. Filming for each season is split over the start of the summer and the start of the fall. After each round, the Sharks and their teams do due diligence on each of the companies to ensure that everything within the company is how it was represented in the pitch room.

There are times when the numbers check out, but the entrepreneurs decide they no longer want to make a deal, such as when the founders of evREwares decided they weren't actually willing to sell 100 percent of their struggling company to Cuban for $200,000, as they agreed to do in season six.

Ultimately, said Cuban's fellow Shark Daymond John, about 80 percent of season seven's deals made on camera closed, which is up from about 60 percent to 70 percent in past seasons.

Each of the six Shark Tank investors have different management styles, but the main reason they typically ask for high-equity deals is that they are more hands-on than a typical venture-capital firm or angel investor.

Cuban said he and the Dallas-based Mark Cuban Cos. team "often take over their accounting, website, packaging design, and more."

Mark Cuban Cos. also optimizes a company's online presence through free software deals with business partners. Cuban's Shark Tank companies host their sites on Rackspace's servers and use customer-relationship management software from Nimble to store communications and monitor site analytics.

Cuban boosts his new companies' sales by assigning them seasoned marketers from his team and arranging distribution deals with partners like Amazon Exclusives and Brookstone.

"We realize that by taking the back office off their hands, they can focus on core competencies," Cuban said.

4 Technology Trends for Small Business

As a small business owner, it's not always top priority to keep up with the "next big thing." You have a business to build, finances to manage, employees to retain and customers to attract, meaning you don't have time to be in the loop about the latest gizmos and hottest technology trends.

It may be easy for business owners to think this way, but that doesn't mean it's a smart business move. One of the most challenging disadvantages that small businesses have is that you don't have the funds and manpower that giant corporations often do. Not keeping up with the latest business tech trends can put you even further behind since these solutions are capable of organizing and analyzing operations so that you can focus on sales and growth.

Below are four tech trends that will contribute to that growth for small businesses.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

We all know, communication makes or breaks all relationships. For small businesses, the key to selling faster and better is to understand and communicate effectively with your consumers, which sounds simple, but is actually quite difficult when you factor in all of the other priorities you have. It's easy to miss out on relevant information, which leads to a miss opportunities.

This is exactly why it's so necessary for small businesses to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) software to keep track of the interactions and gain better access to customer data. Many CRM systems are affordable and helpful in the sense that all of the information you need for better customer relationships is all in one place. Nonetheless, 71 percent out of the 1,088 business owners and executives surveyed for the Wasp Barcode Technologies State of Small Business Reportadmitted that they don't use any kind of CRM software. This is a bad business move as CRM systems can maximize financial opportunities, allow businesses better access to customer information, manage sales pipelines and sales representatives, and analyze performance and business metrics.

A few recommended CRM softwares are as followed:

Salesforce is the world's number one CRM solution, according to its website, and is used by more than 100,000 organizations worldwide. The software promises to effectively track all sales activity as well as "every lead, opportunity, and customer" so business owners can "spend more time selling to the right people, armed with their personal marketing data and social insights." Salesforce CRM is completely mobile so you can manage your relationships at your office or while on the road.

Insightly offers social CRM which uses social media integration to detect every social media profile related to a specific email address. This allows businesses to learn more about their customers through their public profile information on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, FourSquare, Picasa, Klout, among others.

Zoho CRM takes visitor data from your website and inputs it into the CRM system, enabling small businesses to easily turn leads into sales. More than 50,000 customers have chosen Zoho for their CRM solution.

Nimble CRM focuses on relationship intelligence to "turn communities into customers" by "auto-magically [pulling] contact profiles, email conversations and social signals into one simple place so you can effectively engage them everywhere you work."

Due Due has more than 70,000 customers using them for an online invoicing and CRM solution. With their easy solution, turn website traffic into a great source of leads for your business.

Network Security

Technology has changed the way we do business, but it's also made us more vulnerable to cyber crimes. Those at the front lines of this danger are small businesses; 60 percent of all cyber crimes are actually directed at small establishments, according to a recent McAfee survey. In fact, the same survey found that only 9% of small businesses have mobile security, less than half have any kind of email security, and only half protect their Internet data. Eighty percent of small businesses fail to have any kind of data encryption for network security.

Considering the numerous incidents of data breaches occurred in recent years, small businesses should make cyber security a top priority. The last thing a business wants is to have their customer credit card information stolen or private messages made public by cybercrooks.

In 2015, small businesses that have not made network security a priority should take the leap to protect both their company and customers. Don't wait for something unfortunate to happen before taking action since it takes much longer to win back trust after you've lost it.

Business intelligence tools

Want to get to the "aha" moment quicker everyday? Business Intelligence (BI) tools is your answer with its ability to offer real-time access to data and analysis that so often leads to quicker intelligence and a higher level of informed decision-making skills.

While simple tools such as spreadsheets may have been enough to get your business rolling in the beginning, it fails in manipulating information that allows small businesses to see the "big picture." Implementing a proper BI tool can help small businesses analyze high volumes of data across multiple sources, and more easily identify how they're all connected.

Below are a few easy-to-use BI tools small businesses should seriously consider using:

QlikView offers small businesses "both a high level view as well as the ability to drill down into the business details." More than 1,000 international government agencies use

Tableau is a browser-and-mobile-based software that takes data and allows users to visualize and create interactive and shareable dashboards secured in the cloud.

Birst has different levels of analytics depending on your company's needs. Both products empower small businesses to explore data in seconds.

LogiXML analytics is aimed at small to mid-sized businesses with no per-user fees and promises affordable pricing. The company says on its website that "unlike expensive, traditional BI platforms or tool kits that require time consuming development, [LogiXML] offers a solution that allows business users to easily create and share their own dashboards and reports while giving developers a platform to rapidly deliver specialized solutions."

Smart Inventory Management

Poor inventory management is one of the major reasons small businesses fail, yet 46% of small businesses with 11-to-500 employees don't track their inventory, according to the State of Small Business Report. Failing to track inventory can lead to products sitting around for years, which Marcus Lemonis recently said on his CNBC show The Profit is comparable to "burning money."

With a limited budget, small businesses need to think about their inventory like cash. If there were piles of cash stocked in your warehouse, wouldn't you find some kind of system to track it? Poor inventory management leads to bad customer service and companies end up with large write offs on their financial statements.

A few smart inventory management tools that would save small businesses a lot of money -- and headache -- are the Wasp Inventory Control, most ideal for small businesses from 5-to-99 employees, Fishbowl Inventory, most suitable for small businesses with 100-999 workers, and AdvancedPro Inventory Management Software for users who prefer QuickBooks.

Since the Great Recession, startups and small establishments have been responsible for seven million out of the 10.9 million jobs added. According to the State of Small Business Report, 57 percent of the owners and executives surveyed anticipate revenue growth for their companies in 2015. With so much optimism in the air, right now seems to be the best time for small businesses to strategically plan for explosive growth. The above tech trends can help you get there a lot faster by doing the grunt work for you so that you can focus on sales and growth. Small businesses don't always have to be on top of the latest tech trends, but they should pay attention if the tools will help them move ahead at a much smarter and faster speed.

Nimble Ushers in the Age of CRM Automation

Over the past few years, small business use of marketing automation solutions have skyrocketed. It’s no surprise, really, as these solutions automate “significant aspects of customer acquisition such as lead generation, qualification and nurturing activities”.

In other words, marketing automation enables you to save one of your small business’s most important resources: time.

While many marketing automation solutions include significant customer relationship management (CRM) features and functionality, that side of the equation remains the least automated of all. Yes, every interaction with a lead is recorded and tied to their contact record however, beyond that automatically captured information, you and your staff must populate each contact record manually.

In other words, your CRM activities, from data entry to data mining, still consume a lot of time. This is exactly the pain point that Nimble was created to relieve and they’ve done so by focusing on three key features.

Key Feature #1: The CRM that Builds and Maintains Itself

“The problem with CRM is that it’s a database where you’ve got to type stuff in and it’s too much work for a human being,” says Jon Ferrara, the founder and CEO of Nimble.

Ferrara believes that traditionally, “CRM stands more for Customer Reporting Management, rather than Relationship Management because relationships happen in Outlook address books and Google contacts. Those are your relationship managers.”

However, even those contact managers don’t save a lot of information and they certainly don’t aggregate it into one easily understood and usable contact record.

Ferrara contends, “You need a complete view of what’s going on with a person. You need connections to calendars and email and social signals to make that happen.”

And that’s view is exactly what Nimble has built. As you can see below, a Nimble contact record contains everything from social media profiles to education, social messages, email messages and more. Most importantly, this content record was automatically compiled by Nimble once we imported our Twitter contacts into their system.

As Ferrara puts it, “The most important thing you can have in a CRM is data, and if you have contacts and insights, that’s 60% of the work that any businessperson has.”

Importing is where everything begins. Nimble can pull your contact records from a variety of systems including Google Contacts, Gmail and Twitter. Once the platform has the information, it builds your contact records by matching information from many disparate systems. The result? A complete view of each contact, no data entry required.

“Your calendar activities, messages and social interactions are all connected to the record automatically,” says Ferrara. “Nimble builds each contact record so you understand where they’re from, where they work, where they went to school, what they’re influential in, whether they’re an investor, all that stuff.”

What’s more, Nimble actually brings the data down so it’s yours to own, as it should be in a CRM solution. They also update your contact database on a daily basis, bringing new and changed information into the contact record automatically.

“What people love about Nimble,” says Ferrara, “is that it’s the first relationship platform that works for you by building itself.”

Key Feature #2: Anytime, Anywhere Context

Once Nimble builds your contact records, you can use its browser plugins to access your records as you work online.

“If you’re sitting inside of your CRM,” says Ferrara, “you’re not engaging with customers. You need context and insights on everyone that you’re engaging with — Nimble give you the ability to ‘Nimble’ anyone anywhere.”

This powerful feature is a game-changer, forever altering the landscape of how CRMs support marketing and sales professionals. Here’s an example that, in Ferrara’s words, “Just might blow your mind.”

Access Your Contact Records Anytime, Anywhere

Let’s say you’re working on LinkedIn, nurturing your connections and looking for new ones. Using the Nimble sidebar, you can pull up the details of anyone on LinkedIn:

A view of the Nimble sidebar on a LinkedIn profile. In the interest of showing the full view, we’ve broken the sidebar into pieces moving left to right.

As you can see, Nimble has built a profile for our LinkedIn connection on the fly, including information that did not originate on LinkedIn. If we want to add the contact to our in Nimble, all we need do is click the, “Add To Nimble” button.

Now, we have some context however, Nimble enables you to dig deeper as well as take action right there and then.

Deeper Context and Taking Action

As you can see below, Nimble’s sidebar offers a number of super-handy features:

1. Dig deeper into a contact’s record using this menu. “This way, I can see the history of conversations, the history of interactions,” says Ferrara. “I can see what this person’s saying to the world and interact with them.”
2. Schedule or record an action by clicking on the circled plus icon.
3. Send a message via connected channels by clicking on the envelope icon.

With all this context and functionality at your fingertips, your marketing and sales efforts just got a lot easier to manage. Or, as Ferrara succinctly put it, ” The most important thing is to be able to follow-through wherever you’re at.”

Key Feature #3: Automatic Segmentation

As shown below, Nimble offers a number of ways to slice and dice your contacts (i.e. segmentation):

This is basic CRM functionality but as with many of it’s features, Nimble is about to take segmentation to the next level.

“Using the data we pull behind the scenes,” says Ferrara, “we’ve built a new segmentation engine (rolling out soon) that let’s you use any of that data and we’ve pre-faceted your contacts.”

As you can see, this new feature will enable you to search on a number of useful data points, all built for you automatically (note the black boxes near the top of this photo):

Here’s an example of one of these drop-down menus built by Nimble using the data they’ve pulled from our contacts:

Using this functionality you can really dig into your data. For example, if you wanted to find all contacts who are CEOs of Chicago-based companies who are interested in SEO, this new segmentation engine would make doing so a snap.

Conclusion

While we’ve explored three of Nimble’s key features, there’s a lot more under the hood including tags, integrations with other types of solutions and group mailing/tracking functionality.

Perhaps the most compelling facet of Nimble is its ability to give you a whole view of each of your contacts. As Ferrara put it, “Your CRM system needs to be both professional and personal because that’s how relationships grow, by forming connections to the person, not the contact record.”

37 Tools Successful Salespeople Cannot Live Without

As a salesperson, or as someone concerned with sales in your company, you probably have a say in which tools will help you grow sales. So here’s an infographic that shows you the best sales tools you can buy today, and where their strengths lie along the sales pipeline – so you can start your research right here.

These tools are truly the nuts and bolts that make up the entire pipeline, running from lead generation to lead tracking, interactions with leads, prospect management, prospect closing, and after-sales service and support.

These are our opinions on where the tools excel in the sales process, and don’t actually mean that they are only in that space. As you can imagine, most of the CRM (customer relationship management) tools have overlapping or all-encompassing offerings that go from lead generation to the actual close.

We also included customer support tools as a way of showing that sales don’t just end with a close – it ends with nurturing and taking care of customers in an ongoing manner.

Detailed explanation of the pipeline process & tools:

(All tools in a category are listed alphabetically)

Pipe section 1 – Lead generation and tracking

In the lead generation space, we’ve included the most effective lead generation tools that run the gamut from inbound to social to sales enablement. These drive leads into your funnel so your SDRs (sales development reps) can qualify them quickly.

AgileCRM: great for lead generation when they started, but have now branched out into becoming a complete CRM system.

CapsuleCRM: big focus on lead tracking and communications, especially on syncing your emails to your CRM.

ClearBit: helps you find good leads and look up contact information on the leads you’re trying to reach.

Repsly: mobile CRM for field teams that require CRM and data collection systems on the go.

Tout App: considered in the space of “sales enablement”, it’s a good way to run marketing right next to sales.

Pipe section 2 – Lead task management

After leads start going through the process of qualifications, there are some tasks and actions that need to be done to get them better acquainted with your offerings.

For many SMEs, the most effective CRM tools are clustered in this space since they are more likely to have slight shorter pipelines than large sales teams – hence the task management aspect becomes crucial in helping teams to manage their leads.

Again, we emphasize that while most CRMs also provide these functions, these systems specifically target their offerings towards small teams that require lead task management.

Contactually: helps you to follow up with your leads more consistently so they remain warm to you.

Highrise: from the team behind BaseCamp, Highrise targets smaller businesses with this CRM.

Insightly: very popular CRM for small businesses, and promises to make you a small superhero.

Nimble: updates your contacts automatically with social information, and helps you figure out who to talk to.

Nutshell: prides itself on its integration with other tools, and organizational abilities.

Pipe section 3 – Interactions & automation

The interactions with customers need to be tracked, and most people use apps to track how their leads are doing and what they need to follow up on. At this point, after leads have been qualified, more needs to be done in terms of preparations for negotiations and understanding of final decision makers and specific needs.

Intelligence and automation in this space is important for a process-oriented pipeline to optimize for negotiations to happen.

Infusionsoft: automated marketing and referrals are the main pitches for Infusionsoft, though they do it all.

Inbox by Gmail: with the introduction of Smart Reply, it can help you get started replying emails faster.

KeyReply: reply faster to common queries with a keyboard that has your team’s responses within any text field on mobile.

Pipe section 4 – Prospect management

Once leads become qualified, they are prospects that we need to drive to a close. This often means that the biggest and baddest (in this context that’s a good thing, heh) CRMs are jostling to help teams log their movements through negotiations.

You can see that most of the best CRM tools sell their products as prospect management software, even though they do start logging interactions way before this, even as leads. Primarily though, and for illustration purposes, CRM tools fall into the category of prospect management.

Close.io: main feature is the fact that you can make calls within 1 click on the pipeline management dashboard.

CRMnext: flexible deployment on either private or public cloud, good for verticals with specific security needs.

Pipedrive: lightweight and easy for small teams to start managing pipelines.

PipelineDeals: sales productivity is the name of the game in their marketing, and it’s simple to get started.

Salesforce: #1 CRM in the world. What did you think? They created the category as we know it today.

SAP CRM: integrates data from various customer functions across channels.

SugarCRM: affordable enterprise CRM that is one of the most highly customizable in integrations and deployment.

Zoho CRM: extension of the Zoho suite of products, and free or affordable to start for small teams.

Some CRM tools pride themselves on their ability to draw out pertinent data and predict the win rates for prospect accounts (based on the probability that they will close). As we’ve seen above, with access and understanding of the entire process, it can be useful to have a predictive forecast of the likelihood of certain accounts closing, so sales teams can focus on those most likely to be worth their time.

Base: touts its ability to find insights and optimize the right accounts to focus on to get higher win rates.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM: predictions across channels using analytics drawn from different sources along the customer journey.

Oracle: helps you identify “white spaces” for upselling and cross-selling to customers, on top of predictions.

Pipe section 6 – Customer support & engagement

After the close, account management and customer support becomes an imperative to keep customers. You’ve heard the saying that it’s easier to retain a customer than to acquire one, so it’s a company’s job to take great care of their customers with world-class support systems, behavioral or drip marketing, open lines of communication, and self-service tools.

Freshdesk: popular customer service helpdesk software, free/affordable to start for small teams.

Help Scout: knowledge base site and embed forms on every site, on top of ticket management.

Intercom: makes it really easy to manage and reach customers in the same place, with little development time.

Jira Service Desk: manage IT tickets and support tickets together for faster issue resolutions.

Salesforce Desk: a relatively newer offering from Salesforce, good for scaling teams.

Uservoice: lets users vote on features to help the product management process, plus a knowledge base for support.

Zen desk: integrates all inbound service requests, with self-service knowledge bases and a “multichannel” strategy.

How to pick your own mix of tools

There are some general factors that you should consider when picking your own set of tools, including the size of your team, how fast you’re scaling, sales amounts, support needs, and important features that appeal to you including deployment and mobility.

This warrants another post in itself, but you can definitely use the above as a guide to start your selection process. Generally, a combination of lead drivers in section 1, a good reply platform in section 3, along with a lightweight (or free) option in section 4 or 2 will be a good bet for smaller teams to get started.

Once the team and customer numbers grow, and support requests start flooding in, a tool in section 6 will be important for both service and product managers to understand how to better improve customers’ experience.

6 CRM Predictions For 2016

Experts in sales, marketing and customer relationship management share their thoughts regarding which CRM features and trends will be the most buzzed about in the year ahead.

CRM software has come a long way from its early days as a desktop-based sales tool. And each year, it seems, there’s some hot new flavor of CRM – social CRM, cloud CRM, mobile CRM, vertical CRM – with new vendors and apps constantly entering the market.

So what will be the big trends in CRM in 2016? Here are six predictions.

CRM software will become even more social. “In 2016, we'll see a lot more CRM providers adding new social media features, whether that be tracking customer interactions or suggesting new contacts,” says Marc Prosser, cofounder, Fit Small Business. “Nimble is out ahead on this, but expect others to add these features while their team (and others) devise new ways CRM can take advantage of social media.”

Mobile CRM will become a must-have. In 2016, “we'll see CRM go mobile in a big way,” says Prosser. “So far, most mobile CRM apps have focused on providing a basic phone-ready version of the desktop version, usually without the full set of features.” Over the next 12 months, however, “expect to see CRM mobile apps adding features that interact with map and note-taking apps.” Also, “CRM will become less hierarchical and easier to use on the go.”

Sales reps will rely on “mobile CRM [to] keep connected and in touch with prospects and their sales manager,” adds Sean Alpert, senior director, Product Marketing, Sales Cloud,Salesforce. “Real-time data [will] keep reps in the know about everything from usage rates to open service tickets to breaking news about the prospect they’re about to visit. And, mobile CRM [will become a] powerful sales tool as more and more reps eschew traditional slides in favor of showing a demo on their phone or pulling up the latest analytics or dashboards on their [mobile] device."

Integration will be the name of the game. “It's increasingly important that your CRM be able to seamlessly integrate with your ecommerce platform, your marketing automation software, your analytics software, your accounting system... the list goes on and on,” says Katie Hollar, CRM expert at Capterra, an online tool for businesses to find the right software. “Rather than spending hours downloading and uploading CSVs of data from one system to another, CRM users will demand that their provider build these native integrations with other platforms to make them more efficient. And if CRM vendors can't keep up with the demand, users will switch systems, finding one that works better with their existing infrastructure.”

“CRMs will evolve from sales-oriented tools to truly integrated marketing and sales platforms,” predicts Kathleen Booth, CEO,Quintain Marketing. “There has already been some movement in this direction, with many CRMs, such as Salesforce, offering integrations with marketing software. But in the future, integrations will be replaced by all-in-one software platforms that truly marry the needs of sales and marketing,” she says. “One example of a company that is doing this successfully right now is HubSpot, which added a free CRM to its marketing software last year. Expect more companies to enter this market in 2016.”

Vertical CRMs will give traditional CRM solutions some serious competition. “In 2016, the ‘verticalization’ of CRM solutions will be accelerated,” says Adam Honig, cofounder and CEO of Spiro, a personal sales app for salespeople. “A real estate salesperson has different needs than a medical device salesperson, and companies are increasingly realizing that they could benefit from using industry-specific CRM solutions like Veeva, Vlocity and OpenGov,” he says. “These vendors' built-in best practices and processes provide a level of expertise that companies just don't get with a generic CRM solution.”

As a result, “horizontal CRMs will start being replaced by industry-specific vertical CRMs that help you navigate the specific challenges of your industry,” says Anatoly Geyfman, CEO, Carevoyance. “Healthcare is a big example of this,” he says. “Veeva, a CRM for the pharma [and life sciences] industry, was in the first wave of these, but the wave is not over.” Now, as a result of an influx of industry-specific software solutions, “even Salesforce is releasing industry-specific features and brands for its CRM product.”

More CRM platforms will be equipped with predictive analytics capabilities. “In 2016, CRM systems will have analytics engines behind them that will enable the ability to provide real-time offers to customers based on predicting what they will want next or what kind of product or service they might buy next,” says Rebecca Sendel, senior director, Data Analytics and Customer Experience Management Programs, TM Forum, a global industry association for digital businesses.

“Predictive analytics combined with CRM data gives marketers and salespeople the chance to learn, at a deeper level, customers’ habits and then react to those in real time,” says Vicki Godfrey, CMO, Avention, a provider of data solutions. “This makes for more personalized interactions, which leads to increased sales, better customer relationships and reduced churn rates.”

Look for the CRM of Things. “We’ve seen the Internet of Things (IoT) make major headway this past year, and CRM will begin to reap the benefits in 2016,” says Dylan Steele, senior director, Product Marketing, App Cloud & IoT Cloud, Salesforce. “Companies today want a complete understanding of their customers, and with billions of connected devices generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, it's more important than ever to know how this data can create an even more personalized customer interaction.”

Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 11/17/2015 -- In today's scenario, organizations need to continuously interact with their customers and fulfill their requirement in order to withstand the market competition. Organizations need to track and process a large amount of customer information in order to increase interaction with future and prospective clients. Therefore, organizations need to have a cutting edge technology in order to manage, synchronize and automate this process. Customer relationship management service involves addressing customer issues or requirements through customer service centers with combination of information technology (IT) services. Hence, customer relationship management (CRM) services help to boost the marketing, sales and customer service function of an organization. CRM services mostly revolve around contact or service centers were a group of professionals solve customer issues. Thus, CRM service providers provide various tools and software, which facilitate the operation in lesser time. CRM based IT service involves storage and tracking of customer data, which is used for forecasting the requirement with the help of advanced data analytics software.

The CRM IT based service can be deployed either on-premise or over cloud based on organization's requirement. Due to low initial cost involved in setting up cloud based service, it is increasingly being preferred by organizations compared to on-premise solutions. Further, the time taken to deploy a CRM service through cloud is relatively less for an organization. In recent years, organizations are opting for third party service providers to outsource their CRM unit. This helps the organization to reduce their upfront cost and concentrate on core activities. CRM services are mainly used in BSFI, telecommunication, healthcare and hospitality sector as these sectors involve providing more personalized customer centric services. Further, CRM services are increasingly being deployed in retail, education, manufacturing and government sector due to its high effectiveness in addressing customer requirement. As the e-commerce industry is continuously evolving in developing countries such as India, China and Brazil, the demand for CRM services is expected to increase in these countries in coming years. CRM services also involve providing technological equipment for voice based services. This helps the organization to deliver high quality voice service with interactive voice response (IVR). Further, the application of big data is expected to provide data analytics service which is expected to help in monitoring of workforce on a regular basis. CRM services help to improve service center performance with constant monitoring and thereby help to increase customer satisfaction. CRM service providers are also providing bring your own device (BYOD) solution, which is expected to boost the demand of CRM service in sales and marketing function.

As the demand for CRM is expected to increase among small and medium enterprises, CRM service providers are constantly targeting this segment to increase their market share. CRM service providers are offering customized solutions to organizations in order to enhance their market presence. However, the concerns regarding privacy and security of data in CRM service has been a challenge for CRM service market. Some of the key CRM service providers are IBM Corp., Oracle Corp., Wipro Limited, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Microsoft Inc., Salesforce.com Inc., NetSuite Inc., Nimble Inc., SugarCRM Inc., SAP SE, Amdocs Ltd., Sage CRM Solutions Ltd. and Ramco Systems Ltd.

This report is a complete study of current trends in the market, industry growth drivers, and restraints. It provides market projections for the coming years. It includes analysis of recent developments in technology, Porter's five force model analysis and detailed profiles of top industry players. The report also includes a review of micro and macro factors essential for the existing market players and new entrants along with detailed value chain analysis.

About Transparency Market Research (TMR)
Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.

Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.

CHICAGO, May 5, 2015 /PRNewswire-iReach/ -- The updated Grid℠ report for CRM software, published today by business software review site G2 Crowd, ranks 35 products to help purchasers in their selections.

The Spring 2015 report is based on data from more than 2,500 reviews written by business and marketing professionals.

The Grid℠ was created from G2 Crowd's software review platform, which compiles customer satisfaction as reported by users, along with vendor market presence as determined from public and social data, to rank products.

The Spring 2015 report also includes Grids℠ representing reviewer company size segments: Small Business (50 or fewer employees), Mid-Market (51 to 1,000 employees) and Enterprise (1,001+ employees).

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems enable companies to track and manage all customer interactions across the customer lifecycle from lead to order to support in one master system of record. CRM software suites typically provide sales force automation (SFA), marketing automation features, customer support features and a unifying database to manage customer data and customer-facing applications. To qualify as a Leader, a product must receive a high customer satisfaction score and have substantial market presence. Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Zoho CRM and Nimble CRM were named Leaders. High Performers have high customer satisfaction scores with a smaller market presence than Leaders. Salesnet, PipelineDeals, Prophet CRM, Workbooks.com,Base CRM, Contactually, Pipedrive, Apptivo, Nutshell, Pipeliner CRM, WORK[etc.], GreenRope,InfoFlo Software, CiviCRM, Membrain, Really Simple Systems and Relenta CRM were named High Performers. Nimble CRM and Workbooks.com earned the highest overall customer satisfaction scores. The Grid℠ for CRM (Small Business) featured Salesforce CRM, Zoho CRM, Nimble CRM, PipelineDeals, Salesnet, Prophet CRM, Base CRM, Workbooks.com and Contactually as Leaders. Pipedrive, WORK[etc.], Pipeliner CRM, Nutshell, InfoFlo Software, CiviCRM, Membrain and Relenta CRM were named High Performers for this segment.

The Grid℠ for CRM (Mid-Market) featured Salesforce CRM, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Zoho CRM as Leaders. Salesnet, PipelineDeals, Nimble CRM, Prophet CRM and Workbooks.com were named High Performers for this segment.

The Grid℠ for CRM (Enterprise) featured Salesforce CRM as the only Leader. Nimble CRM, PipelineDeals, Workbooks.com and Prophet were named High Performers for this segment.

Across all CRM systems, reviewers reported the product they use meets their requirements at an average rate of 81%, and on average reviewers said they were 80% likely to recommend the product they use. Products appearing on the CRM Grid℠ for the first time were Prophet CRM, Membrain, Relenta CRM, Really Simple Systems, GreenRope, Apptivo, vtiger, and Insightly.

In addition, the average reported implementation time across all CRM products was 2.2 months, and the average payback period in which users received a positive ROI was eight months.

"Salesforce [CRM] allows for all team members to collaborate and track clients in one clean arena. The biggest advantage is the ability to start tracking prospects and leads and turn them into closed business. We are able to watch the sales cycle from beginning to end."

- Maxx Krueger, Business Development & Analytics at Infegy

"[Microsoft Dynamics CRM is] very user friendly. You don't have to be a techie to figure out how to customize and tailor the solution to your specific needs and requirements. For example, it's mainly a CRM geared toward sales professionals. I was able to fully customize the solution to fit our real estate and acquisition needs."

- Jasmine Polson, Associate at Avison Young Commercial Real Estate

"All companies need people[,] but what small companies...need is the ability to connect efficiently, [and] establish information with a...CRM that is intuitive and reliable. Zoho works! You can build relationships, set tasks, events and follow ups easily...It's great."

- Paula Sharratt, Business Development at Central High Rise

[Nimble CRM] is easy to set up. I uploaded [more than 3,500] contacts and 30 deals on day one and was completely up and running [two] days later. The tool is easy to navigate and quickly link deals to contacts and [vice] versa.

- Luke Wissmann, VP of Sales and Business Development at OceanGate

Of the more than 180 software vendors listed in G2 Crowd's CRM category, the 35 ranked products each received 10 or more reviews to qualify for inclusion on the Grid℠.

Satisfaction rankings are generated from the user reviews, and market presence is calculated from vendor size, market share, and social impact. Based on a combination of these scores, each software solution is categorized as a Leader, High Performer, Contender, or Niche.

Premium research access can be purchased at G2Crowd.com/categories/crm. These offer the original data for filtering and weighting, as well as individual profiles of platforms with at least 20 helpful positive and negative CRM platform reviews, detailed company information, user satisfaction ratings, feature scores and customer metrics. Future refreshes of the Grid℠ will provide updated rankings based on the latest reviews and social data.

Be sure to check out the new Grid℠ for the best CRM software and subscribe to the premium research. About G2 Crowd, Inc. G2 Crowd, the world's leading business software review platform, leverages its roughly 30,000 user reviews to drive better purchasing decisions. Technology buyers, investors, and analysts use the site to compare and select the best software based on peer reviews and synthesized social data. Co-founded by the founder and former executives from SaaS leader BigMachines and backed by more than $4.5 million in capital, G2 Crowd aims to bring authenticity and transparency to business technology research. For more information, go to G2Crowd.com.

A small social media management and advertising agency shares how its sales organization of one succeeds by having a tool that supports conversational sales.

Occasionally we talk to a small business to discover lessons that can be applied to the larger enterprise. Recently, I spoke with Brooke B. Sellas CEO and founder ofB Squared Media, a social media management and advertising agency she founded six years ago but which can count a broad range of clients like Wolter Kluwers, Rutgers and Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, Greater NY Chapter among its portfolio.

Brooke B. Sellas, CEO B Squared Media

The firm usesSprout Socialfor social media management which allows them to connect all their clients and their accounts in one place. B Squared Media supports its customers according to their needs which might include chatbots, social listening, creative outreach. But as Ms Sellas explains:

It’s really not about the tool although the tool helps us get the job done and keeps us organized. It’s really about our one on one relationship with the client and their person or persons. When they get paired up with an account manager they get a whole team of people who complete certain tasks. So for instance, a community manager who essentially monitors the page and looks for any questions, responds to those questions and then works through any escalating type of problem, question or concern, passing it back internally to the appropriate people.

From listening to Ms Sellas, it was apparent that conversations which speak in the voice of the customer’s customer lie at the heart of the firm’s business model since that allows the agency to offer services that provide a sense of authenticity that is crucial to social media success. With that in mind, I turned my attention to the other end of the business; the sales pipeline.

I was surprised to learn that Ms Sellas is the only salesperson out of a team of 13. That’s unusual but she says that usingNimbleallows her to run the entire sales operation from prospecting to client adds.

I attend a lot of conferences and speak at certain events, so there’s always a big card collection thing that goes on there. I can scan those cards right into Nimble with my phone and tag them with the conference. When I go through and deal with follow-ups all I have to do is pull up that tag and then send communications to set follow up meetings or a free consultation as appropriate.

Ms Sellas takes a pragmatic approach to understand pipeline that fits more closely with the stages she recognizes as part of the sales process i.e. prospecting, free consultation, proposal sent, follow up, holding pattern for early-stage businesses and deal close. In order to keep track of what’s going on, Ms Sellas keeps notes inside Nimble which, in turn, integrates with Office365, the firm’s standard productivity toolset. As prospects go through the pipeline, Nimble allows her to forecast based on the activity she is seeing in those prospect records.

I wondered how Ms Sellas discovered Nimble. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it came through social media.

I’ve found out about a lot of new tools on Twitter and that is how I heard about a webinar Nimble was planning. I liked what I saw and did their 30 days free trial. I was also testing other CRMs at the time and as a small business owner, I had a lot of questions. They were always so great about answering my questions and making sure that they answered in a way that was really helpful to me. The customer service I would say is number one, but number two, they were really cost effective.

Cost is always a gating factor for small businesses and I wondered how Ms Sellas felt about competitive solutions. She said that in the past, she’d used Infusionsoft but found that Nimble offered comparable functionality at a fraction of the price.

Infusionsoft’s drag and drop campaign builder isn’t there in Nimble but Nimble’s email integration removes the need for that and simplifies how I work. For instance, I create different templates for each event I attend depending on whether I’m speaking or in the crowd. All I have to do is pull up the tag that I popped in when I scanned those business cards in or once I placed those contacts in and then I can send communications straight through Nimble using a template, changing whatever I might need. Nimble will show me who opened it, I’ll see who responded. Obviously, I try to have a call to action in every single one of those. Having that open notification then means I can resend as needed.

So pragmatism wins?

I think a lot of times we get caught up in the shiny object syndrome because it looks pretty and the drag and drop builder looks super amazing and awesome, but at the end of the day I just need relatively simple functionality I can readily follow. It may not work for everyone but then I like to follow a Keep It Simple, Stupid way of working.

I asked whether Ms Sellas had considered tying Nimble to LinkedIn sales prospecting capability. While she’s not dismissing LinkedIn entirely, Ms Sellas had a poor experience with outsourcing LinkedIn prospecting.

I’m not pushy and I feel like a lot of those LinkedIn campaigns are pushy. When I log into Linkedin and I get these emails, “Hey, Brooke, I see we have a lot of people in common. Let’s connect.” And I connect and then the next email I get is, “I’d like to sell you this service” And then I’m like, “Man, I’m not into that.” Sure I need to sell but I want to build my network as the way to success.

Like all software, Nimble has its shortcoming and here, Ms Sellas said she’d like to have the ability to export data for use in meetings with her CFO as a way to better understand the sales forecast or alternatively have comparative reports. And despite loving the card scanner tool, would like to see some improvements in its accuracy.

Quantifying benefits in these types of system is often difficult to pin down to financial metrics but as a single salesperson organization, Ms Sellas is convinced that Nimble saves her time which she characterizes as money earned.

It’s definitely helped process efficiency, quickly putting more leads into the pipeline and then also being more effective at closing down non-qualified partnerships has helped me focus on closing more qualified partnerships. It’s a virtuous circle.

As we concluded our conversation I was reminded of the things that seem to win out in case studies time and again: efficiency – however that’s measured – coupled with good enough functionality at a sensible price point but with attention to service and the needs of the customer taking on increasing importance.

Today’s business owners, sales teams, and marketing managers face ever-changing challenges. Rapidly transforming technology means client interactions, product marketing, and data analysis all move at the speed of light. Failure to adapt to this fast-paced marketing world means losing out on potential clients.

In an online atmosphere where social media and email interactions are critical to successful sales, how can you possibly keep up with it all?

Thankfully, software developers are hard at work creating products that allow business owners and sales teams to spend less time wading through data, inputting names, numbers, emails, and essential information into spreadsheets. It’s called Customer Relationship Management Software – CRM software for short – and it’s changing the way businesses approach content and sales marketing.

We are here to introduce you to Nimble, the leading CRM Software Tool. Nimble is the first CRM Software to integrate social media connections with CRM functionality. Nimble is the current Top Sales Intelligence Software Tool for Small Business Satisfaction as voted on by Microsoft 365 and G Suite users.

CRM Software allows small business owners or sales managers at larger corporations to easily track contacts and interactions with clients, see valuable sales analytics, and customize calendar tasks. In short, CRM tools allow you to spend less time entering data and running numbers and more time connecting with clients. Start building the “customer relationship” without all the management hassles.

How Is Nimble Different?

Nimble is the first CRM Software to marry social media capabilities with CRM functionality. In today’s social media-savvy world,online marketing and social mediago hand in hand. If you’re not engaging with clients on social media, you’re missing out on countless opportunities to market your brand and learn about your customer base. Nimble allows teams to nurture relationships across email and social networks by combining the power of enterprise CRM, contact management, and social media into an easy-to-use platform.

Listen to Jon Ferrara, the CEO of Nimble, talk about the power of relationships and Nimble.

Group Your Contacts and Stay Connected

Nimble seamlessly tracks your social media contacts, email contacts, and Office 365, G Suite, or Gmail contacts, as well as contacts from more than 130 SaaS-based business apps in one central location. With a simple click on a button, Nimble finds information on your contacts. While you might only have an email address, Nimble will search social media accounts, Office 365 profiles, and more to create a strong professional portfolio for each contact on your list. Nimble does the research, so you don’t have to.

When you better know and understand your clients’ needs, you can connect with them in a more meaningful and useful way. Nimble helps you learn more about your customers in less time, meaning you can spend more time interacting with the people who matter most to your business.

Stay Organized

Nimble’s CRM Software syncs calendars from across your social media, email, and Office 365 profiles to create a complete picture of your schedule. Keep track of office agendas, delegate tasks to other team members, and see which tasks are already completed. It’s all there on Nimble, making your life easier.

Analytics Tools to Help Your Business Grow

Not only does Nimble keep your contact and calendar in order, but it also provides essential email analytics to keep your marketing strategy moving forward. Nimble tracks who has opened emails, who hasn’t, and which marketing trends are most effective. Use the sales forecasting tools to create marketing strategies that work for your business, helping your business grow.

Plus, you can keep an eye on other businesses in your industry. Track data from competing companies using the business intelligence tools – see company sizes, revenues, employees, and other data – all with the click of a button. Let Nimble do the research while you move your business forward.

Everywhere Access

With its mobile apps for iOS and Android, the Smart Contacts App browser plugin (for Edge, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari), and integrations with Office 365, G Suite, Gmail, Outlook Mobile, and Outlook Desktop, Nimble delivers people and company insights everywhere you engage. Access business and contact data in your Outlook or Gmail inbox, social network, and over 130 SaaS apps.

How Do I Get Started?

Getting started with Nimble is easy and worry-free. You canclick hereto sign up for a 14-day free trial: no obligation, no credit card required. You can try every feature, invite your entire team to join, and if your daily marketing strategy isn’t completely changed by Nimble’s easy-to-use software, you aren’t out a single penny.

However, if like thousands of other satisfied customers you find Nimble to be a game changer in your CRM, you’ll be met with unparalleled customer service,video tutorialsto help you set up every aspect of the integration process, and technical support when you need it.

What do you have to lose? Take back the time you spend doing data entry, scouring over analytics, and manually grouping your contacts. Nimble will do the work for you so you can get back to running your business.

Nimble Also Crowned Market Leader in CRM and #1 Small Business Sales Intelligence Tool for the Sixth Consecutive Year by G2 Crowd

Nimble— the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite — announced today that it has been named an Email Tracking Software Market Leader according toG2 Crowd, the world’s premier business software reviews platform. Nimble’s ranking is based on receiving ahigh Customer Satisfaction score (4.4 out of 5 stars)and having a large Market Presence in the category. Nimble’s email tracking is available out-of-the-box and at no extra charge to small business teams and professionals.

Office 365 and G Suite users also rank Nimble as aMarket Leader in the small business CRMcategory, and#1 Small Business Sales Intelligence Toolfor the sixth consecutive year, according to G2 Crowd.

Everything You Need in a Simple, Smart Sales Force Automation System

“The G2 Crowd ratings validate the power, simplicity, and value that our Sales Force Automation features deliver to Nimble users,”said Nimble CEO, Jon Ferrara.“We are deeply grateful to our many customers who continue to share their experiences using Nimble to personalize outreach at scale to their top prospects; monitor email and social engagement signals to prioritize follow ups; and assign tasks and automate reminders that help users close more deals by cultivating trusted relationships.”

Nimble’s Sales Force Automation features optimize internal processes, enabling Office 365 and G Suite users to focus on connecting with more prospects and cultivating authentic relationships with more prospective buyers in order to sell more. Among them:

Nimble’s Group Messagingempowers Office 365 and G Suite users to send templated, trackable group emails to targeted contacts complete with analytics and reporting. These contacts can be segmented based on tagged groups built using Nimble-driven social business insights. Each outreach appears as a sincere one-to-one conversation rather than a mass email blast, increasing the probability of opens and clicks.

What Customers Love About Nimble’s Group and Individual Email Tracking

“Email tracking is nothing new. However, it helps me identify the best opportunities to engage influencers, contributors, clients, and prospects when used as part of Nimble’s SFA feature set,”said Jeff Bullas, CEO ofJeffBullas.com. “With Nimble, I can grow my global network and my business, without the high cost or complexity of an enterprise solution.”

“By using Nimble’s email tracking and Google Drive or OneDrive to share proposals versus attachments, I know every time someone opens my proposal or revisits it,”explained Shane Gibson, co-founder ofProfessional Sales Academy. He segments prospects into three categories, and then uses Nimble’s Stay-in-Touch feature to drive ongoing touches with critical contacts: “Regularly touching A-list contacts by sharing an article, inviting them to a webinar, sending a lead their way, asking them a question, or commenting on their latest LinkedIn update is a powerful strategy for nurturing relationships to drive more sales.”

“Nimble represents a low cost of entry, high value communications platform for managing all of the key relationships you might have — from prospects to customers to industry influencers,”said Lee Odden, CEO ofTopRank Marketing.“While my team relies on the many pipeline management features for prospect and influencer engagement, Nimble’s robust auto-generated profiles have been particularly effective for me by providing the insight I need to engage with my distinct audiences in the most meaningful way.”

“Nimble helps me stay on top of the most important relationships driving our business,”said Eamon Moore, CEO and co-founder ofHikari Data.“I immediately know which actions I need to take based on email, social, and pipeline signals; calendar appointments; follow-up tasks; and project milestones. The ability to access Nimble’s incredibly rich, auto-generated profiles within the deals pipeline, sales funnel, activities lists, and calendar helps me connect authentically with each individual customer and prospect; thereby driving our sales, service, and customer satisfaction.”

About Nimble

Nimble’s pioneering social sales and marketing CRM helps teams and professionals turn relationships into revenue, without the time-intensive busy work. Every day, people use Nimble to successfully nurture their personal and business relationships across email, social networks, and more than 130 cloud-based business applications. Nimble’s simple, smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite has been named best CRM in Market Leadership, Ease of Use and Satisfaction by many experts including: 2017 CRMWatchlist Winnerfor three consecutive years, CRM Market Leader for Small Businesses by G2 Crowd in Fall 2018 for the sixth consecutive year, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the sixth consecutive time, and #1 Small Business Sales and Marketing CRM byFit Small Business. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights everywhere you work.Try Nimble’s 14 day free trialtoday, or learn more atNimble.com.

I've used my October columns the past couple of years to pose questions to executives at some of the leading CRM vendors serving small-business customers. Two years ago I asked why CRM adoption wasn’t higher. Last year I asked what small-business customers want from CRM vendors. So this year I wanted to know what small-business customers weren’t taking full advantage of when it comes to using CRM systems. Below are some areas the executives cited, and why.

ACTUALLY USING CRM

Even in 2018, we’re still seeing a majority of small businesses not using a CRM application at all, according to MeredithSchmidt, executive vice president and general manager of Salesforce Essentials and SMB. “Although SMBs seek to offer better customer experiences, only 33 percent of them are currently using CRM tools. It’s unfortunate, because on average, small businesses spend 23 percent of workdays manually inputting data. CRM can eliminate many manual processes.”

AUTOMATING IMPORTANT PROCESSES

Speaking of eliminating manual processes, that’s another area where SMBs must start taking full advantage of CRM, according to Nimble founder Jon Ferrara. “Any CRM requiring end users to go to the CRM to use it and manually update conversation histories and contact information is faulty at its core. Look for options that enable users to be more effective at engaging customers and prospects by unifying contacts into a single system of record; enriching those records with company and business insights; and empowering them to engage everywhere they work.

Salesforce’sSchmidtagrees. “Automatically keeping customer records up to date without tedious data entry by connecting a user’s email and calendar means small businesses spend less time on manual data entry and more time finding, winning, and keeping customers.”

MANAGING RELATIONSHIPS INSTEAD OF DATA

Traditional CRM systems were built solely with the transactional sales team in mind, says Jon Lee, CEO and founder of Copper (formerly ProsperWorks). “Today, that’s changed. Companies not only manage customers but a broad range of business relationships that are not captured in a CRM. In this new era, every relationship interaction and conversation needs to be captured as companies shift to build lasting relationships and repeat business.”

Insightly chief marketing officer Tony Kavanaugh notes that SMBs need to focus more on the “R” part of CRM. “CRM deployments should treat sales force automation as table stakes and focus on what it takes to make the buyer journey as frictionless and as fruitful as possible. Relationship scoring and intelligence, sentiment and signal analytics, next-best-action recommendations, project delivery, and AI-based advice at every step of the buying journey are all key to this new imperative.”

BENEFITING MORE FROM INTEGRATED DATA AND PLATFORMS

Integrated applications and platforms can greatly increase ease of use and efficiency, but “I don’t think businesses have fully recognized the benefits of having all of their customer data on one platform and just how much further it extends the use of CRM,” says Vijay Sundaram, Zoho’s chief strategy officer. “As CRM starts to unify business information by going upstream into marketing processes, downstream into customer support, and cross-stream into finance, inventory, and invoicing processes, it will transform what a business can learn about its customers. Insights previously available only at a business-unit level will now be available at any segment level, or even at the level of individual customers. Profitability and lifetime value can be examined under any dimension captured by CRM, like industry, geography, deal size, customer tenure, etc. That would be the Holy Grail for financial analysis.”

SugarCRM CEO Larry Augustin also thinks integrated data can help more SMBs succeed. “We find it surprising that a lot of CRM users are not yet leveraging third-party data sources and services to augment the data in their systems. CRM has seen some adoption issues, specifically because users don’t want to put data into the system. And using data services does the heavily lifting for users, driving adoption in addition to enhanced productivity.”

LEVERAGING AI TO KNOW MORE ABOUT CUSTOMERS

Augustin also points out the importance of good data to artificial intelligence. “As AI and other insights-driven approaches to CRM become more prevalent, we must understand that we must first start with rich, deep—and reliable!—data sets to gain meaningful insights.”

Infusionsoft CEO and cofounder Clate Mask agrees. “AI and machine learning are enabling us to really understand how users are benefiting from our products. Using this data, we can then personalize and simplify the experience for our users—which in the end saves small businesses time as they are getting the benefits of the product that best fits their specific needs.”

David Thompson, chief marketing officer of Freshworks, adds that “while AI has seemingly become the nebulous answer to all questions about the future of sales and marketing, it has real applications right now. We’re starting to see our customers take advantage of AI-based lead scoring, as an example, but we expect that adoption will truly start to take off in the next year as the feature proves its value. Qualifying leads continues to be thought of as a manual process, and most automated approaches to this point haven’t done the job. Customers should be able to rely on their CRMs to be an intelligent partner, and AI-based lead scoring is one area where they can see immediate impact.”

TAKING ADVANTAGE OF TRAINING AND BEST PRACTICES

Finally, maybe more small businesses would use CRM—and use it to do more than the obvious things—if they took advantage of the training and best-practices content available to them. Salesforce’sSchmidtsays that “although 62 percent of SMBs feel they would benefit from training that continually improves their operations, there are many types of free training and resources available to them that they likely aren’t aware of. Free online learning environments like Trailhead can help leaders and their teams learn the technologies and strategies that they need to be successful.”

These are just a few of the responses I could fit into this year’s “ask the vendors” column. A big thank-you to all of them for participating. Now I can start thinking about what to ask them next year.

Brent Leary is cofounder of CRM Essentials, an Atlanta-based advisory firm focused on small and midsize businesses. He is also the author ofBarack 2.0: Social Media Lessons for Small Businesses.

Sep 27, 2018

Nimble Crowned #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Small Business in Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd

Sep 27, 2018

Microsoft Office 365, G Suite Users Say Nimble Has Best ROI, Smoothest Implementation, And Is Easiest to Use Sales Insights and Prospecting Software.

Nimble Crowned #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Small Business in Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd

Microsoft Office 365, G Suite Users Say Nimble Has Best ROI, Smoothest Implementation, And Is Easiest to Use Sales Insights and Prospecting Software

Nimble— the Simple, Smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite — announced today that it has been named the Top Sales Intelligence Software Tool for Small Business Satisfaction and overall Market Leader for the sixth consecutive time byG2 Crowd(the world’s leading business software reviews platform).

Nimble has been named a Sales Intelligence Leader based on receiving a high Customer Satisfaction score and having a large Market Presence.Ninety seven percent of Office 365 and G Suite users rated it 4 or 5 stars; 95% of users believe it’s “headed in the right direction;” and 92% said they would be likely to recommend Nimble.

The Simple, Smart CRM That Works for You“We believe a CRM should deliver the social and business context you need to prospect smarter, add the right people to your database, and turn every interaction into a mutually beneficial opportunity everywhere you work. Our customers agree,” said Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble.“We want to extend a heartfelt thank you to thousands of users who continue to share their Nimble experiences and successes, boosting us to the top sales intelligence tool for small businesses for the sixth consecutive time.”

Nimble is also a Market Leader in the CRM and Email Tracking categories, according to hundreds of Office 365 and G Suite user reviews.

Prospect Smarter with Nimble, Everywhere You Work and Engage“Nimble’s unified relationship manager and automatically enriched profiles help us have more productive meetings prospective clients, drive more business opportunities, and propel our rapid growth,”explained Anthony Miller CEO of IT consultancy WOT-LINK. He recommends Nimble for the majority of his Office 365 clients. “Thestrategic alignment between Nimble and Microsoftgives us the features, functionality, and capabilities we wouldn’t get without having to spend a fortune and make the effort to onboard another CRM solution that won’t fulfill our needs.”

“Most of our customers aren’t using a CRM system that can handle profile enrichment or keep the data structure intact,”said Brad Banyas, CEO of SaaS provider OMI. He uses Nimble to enrich contacts inside Salesforce; he advises his clients to do the same.“It doesn’t matter what CRM system you are using because it can’t do what Nimble can do.Nimble is very complimentary to any CRM system, and can be integrated with G Suite and many different SaaS products for a truly powerful solution that helps companies elevate relationship-building efforts and be successful.”

“Inside sales are the lifeblood of FirstCut.IO’s growth engine, and our main lead source isAngelList,” explained Jorge Soto, CEO of FirstCut. His team became avid Nimble users when Nimble released Prospector, a built-in sales intelligence feature that enables users toquickly discover emails, phone numbers, and address details. “Not only can I find contact information within AngelList, but I also get social information, I get hooks into the CRM, and I can export this information directly from the plugin without tedious cross-tabbing.”Soto reports a 10x productivity increase when using Nimble.

About NimbleNimble’s pioneering social sales and marketing CRM helps teams and professionals turn relationships into revenue, without the time-intensive busy work. Everyday, people use Nimble to successfully nurture their personal and business relationships across email, social networks, and more than 130 cloud-based business applications. Nimble’s simple, smart CRM for Office 365 and G Suite has been named best CRM in Market Leadership, Ease of Use and Satisfaction by many experts including: 2017 CRMWatchlist Winnerfor three consecutive years, CRM Market Leader for Small Businesses by G2 Crowd in Fall 2018 for the sixth consecutive year, #1 Sales Intelligence Tool for Customer Satisfaction by G2 Crowd for the sixth consecutive time, and #1 Small Business Sales and Marketing CRM byFit Small Business. Nimble combines the strengths of traditional CRM, classic contact management, social media, sales intelligence, and marketing automation into one powerful relationship management platform that delivers valuable relationship insights everywhere you work.Try Nimble’s 14 day free trialtoday, or learn more atNimble.com.